A WOMAN OF THE ICE AGE

A WOMAN OF THE
ICE AGE

BY
L. P. GRATACAP
Author of “The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars.”

NEW YORK
BRENTANO’S
1906

Copyright, 1906, by
L. P. Gratacap

A WOMAN OF THE ICE AGE

Apology

The Prehistoric Man needs rehabilitation. At least it can be urged that there are possible phases of the prehistoric man that can be elevated into emotional dignity, not unworthy of romance and heroics. It has been too commonly assumed, under the omnipresent pressure of scientific generalizations, that the prehistoric was a semi-feral type of human animal, squalid, distorted, simian-faced, thin-thighed and adumbrant, without speech, perchance groping his blind and biological course upward, by some sort of evolution, into a reasoning, talking, purposive and spiritual creature; that he was a faunal expression simply, like a triceratops in the Upper Cretaceous, or a mud-buffalo in the Philippines.

But there is some sense in claiming for him the possibilities of dramatic action and feeling, assuring to him the restitution of poetic feeling, religious designs, and emotional episodes. It is sensible, for if we place the prehistoric anywhere before the advent of human annals, the length in time of his existence is so enormous that it is inconceivable that he could not have evolved speech, and if speech then the retinue of feelings and ideas which arise with speech, just as speech itself is the index of a cerebral cortex that has become elaborately modified. Let us look at this claim more closely; let us even affectionately increase, intensify and adorn it.

This story has been written under the influence of a melodramatic assumption, hostile, it will be said, to probability, and essentially fanciful, chimerical and fabulous. It cannot be denied that it departs, perhaps summarily, from the postulates of archæology, as to the life and demeanor and mental compass, or, more particularly, emotional resources of that necessary object who must, to relieve anthropology of its lugubrious alarm over accepting a quicker entrance into the world of our race, have lived in the great Prehistoric Day of Geology.

In the day which saw the passage into sedimentary records of the last of the Tertiaries, and carried on its calendars the rise, amplitude and disappearance of the Ice Age, in that day Man lived, and he lived all through it, and it was a long day, measured by thousands of years. But why must it be predicated that man could not have reached in that day such a range of feelings as are involved in the rise and refinement of love? It is perfectly true, as it is entirely permissible so to choose, that this tale of the Woman of the Ice Age, has to do with the advanced types of prehistoric man, and that thus typified the author has reason to insist that Lhatto and Ogga are just creations.

The physical perfection of Lhatto and Ogga cannot be wisely disputed. The prehistoric is usually thought of as a half-emancipated ape, shaggy with hair, protuberant in eye-brows and mouth, shuffling, chattering his uncouth experiments in speech or conveying his desires by grimaces, shrugs, gestures and contortions. But when we realize, that however explained, evolution does not present us with abundant intermediate forms in its processes of improvement, but rather offers us a range of ascending steps, or positions, with the blended connexions removed, it is quite unlikely that in the evolution of man there was any hesitancy in passing from the monkey state to the rights of primogeniture as God’s image.

And the prehistoric must have done so. The requirements of his life, the need of strength and agility, of ingenuity, of muscular resources coupled with the fruitfulness of improving forms, as from century to century reproduction placed him farther and farther in the void and waste of a world, inarticulate and unbridled, these things made him, where environment was favorable, sinuous, forceful, tall, harmonious in physique. And these things, besides putting upon the body the abiding beauty of form, through allied avenues of change would have placed upon his face the stamp of beauty in expression. At least with some. And of these were Lhatto and Ogga. It is not obligatory to be too precise. The romance bends to no sterile laws of ratiocination and logic. It may, for an instant, supercede the harshest negations of science. It does so in this book, but not too carelessly.

For as to environment, it cannot be too sharply noted that it adapts and modifies its organic contents. The plant, the animal, the Man, are bent and made according to the emotional plan it permits.

Buckle has shown how the physical features of a land have been profoundly active in shaping the racial temperaments of the contrasted populations of India and Greece. In India nature is dominating; the lofty mountains, the torrential and wide rivers, the tyrannous climate, form so severe and overpowering a restraint upon human activity that man becomes dwarfed and insignificant. In Greece, nature, less oppressively developed, has induced the growth of a radiant and high and forceful type of man.

Prof. Keane has said of the Hebrew intellect that it is “less varied, but more intense, a contrast due to the monotonous and almost changeless environment of yellow sands, blue skies, flora and fauna limited to a few species, and mainly confined to oases and plains, reclaimed by irrigation from the desert, everywhere presenting the same uniform aspect.” Prof. Gregory has also pointed out the decisive influence of physical environment on the East African races. He summarizes the aspects of these under the general heading of “instability,” as the variable rainfall, earth movements, etc. He says these “keep alive a disposition toward nomad life, alien alike to the growth of either a fatalism like that of India, or culture like that of Greece. All the tribes, however, cannot become nomadic. Some of them are physically and mentally incompetent for the strains of such a life, and must be content with servitude, or else submit to the ever recurring raids of the more powerful tribes. The physical conditions of the country therefore help to divide the people into two classes: one consists of warlike, conquering nomads; the other of feebler races, who either eke out a precarious existence on mountain summits, in forest clearings, and on islands in the vast malarial swamp, or else live as serfs and helots in subjection to the dominant tribes.”

The intensive influence of nature upon man is deeply hidden in the response Man makes to his physical surroundings, which response in some way grows from the attributes of his mind, as that he loves beauty, that he is stimulated to action by desire, that he feels the subtlety of contrast and color, and living wonders and natural splendor.

And that we may extract from this truth the last possible quantity of justification, the story here places Lhatto and Ogga in the midst of a great diversity and extension of natural features. It assumes that long before their time man had eventuated. Not a shadow and mask and caricature, but man in the possession of a mental character that was responsive to all these wonders about him. It assumes that whereas men living near or in glaciated and cold countries were still immersed in a sort of moral hebitude; those men, as Ogga and Lhatto, who by a sudden juxtaposition of the cold and the hot, were swayed by the contrasted marvels of the glacier and semi-tropic forest, had felt the excitation of their sense of beauty and wonder and worship. It assumes for them at least a psychological stage. It assumes that such a region of contrasts could have existed along our western coasts, where the great terminal moraine, the limital outline of the glacier, bends northward. Here was a southern section, warm and prolific and luxuriant, and here was a northern section, as described in the story, lingering under the malign torpor of ice and snow.

It assumes that the period of time chosen, when the Ice was itself surrendering its strongholds and in stubborn despair relinquishing its conquests, was not so far distant from the historic or semi-historic period, not so far distant from this present period of emotional complexity.

Nor is this last assumption unreasonable. The views as to the distance of the Ice Age in time from our own geological day have undergone some marked changes. It is no longer a requisite of geological orthodoxy to place that period in a chronological perspective diminishing to a point of time which may be sixty thousand years away.

Sir Henry H. Howorth, Prof. Bonney, Matthieu Williams, Pettersen, Kjerulf have promulgated their views as to the necessary assumptions of the Glacialists. Howorth, indeed, says (Glacial Nightmare and the Flood) of the tremendous conception of a continental ice-sheet sweeping over the Northern Sea from Norway into Great Britain, that it was “the invention of Croll, who, sitting in his armchair, and endowed with a brilliant imagination, imposed upon sober science this extraordinary postulate.”

The recentness,—and we may here quote acceptably from the Rev. H. N. Hutchinson—“of the Glacial period, is becoming much more generally recognized, and many geologists failed to see how the striations, moraines and roches moutonnées could have lasted for anything like the periods required by the Astronomical theory. One is inclined to think that delicate striations and polishings would have been destroyed by atmospheric influences within the space of twenty thousand years.”

Lhatto and Ogga were indeed placed at a great distance from us, but they are not therefore utterly lost in the shadows or clouds of antiquity, of myth and fable, or somnambulous reverie, as to be alien to our hearts and sympathies.

Lhatto and Ogga were the heirs to a vast amount of temperamental evolution. If they were elevated in feeling, adroit and sensitive in thought, there had been enough time expended in developing men to bestow upon them these virtues of the head and heart.

Has not Prof. A. H. Keane, in his authoritative Compendium of Geography and Travel of South America, said that, “it is beyond reasonable doubt that man had spread in early Pleistocene times from his eastern cradle to the New World, probably by two routes: from Europe by the still persisting land connexion with Greenland and Labrador, and from Asia by the narrow Behring Sea?”

He says “the inference seems inevitable that South America was already in Pleistocene time peopled to its utmost (?) limits by two primitive races, that still persist in the same region”; and if South America a fortiori North America.

It is here assumed, and with reason, that Lhatto and Ogga and Lagk talked, and Prof. Cunningham has pointed out that speech has necessitated structural modifications in the human brain totally absent from the brain of the Anthropoid Ape, and of the speechless microcephalic idiot.

These waifs of reconstruction dwelling in the dark backward of time, from whom, as from others, the motions of the heart and head were to start the wide ethnic impulses which have moved to and fro, like luminous and refluent waves, over the sad face of savage life, these waifs deny no natural assumptions. They lead us only into a new zone of imaginative work, and we are bidden to weave fabrics of design which carry on them the pictures of a lost past, when strange creatures, long extinct, were known to men, themselves extinct, when a strange epoch was placing its landmarks over a world, upon which the dawn of Mind had opened, when the Prehistoric somehow extricated from an inheritance of claws and hair and carnivorous ferocity, felt the mystery of the earth, looked with question upon the unrolled skies, and began the long drama of human love and hate.

Let it be so. Let us not be overscrupulous in the dogmas of our literary faith, nor too inquisitive as to the realism of a resurrected day. Were we always too cautious, our religion—which furnishes you, reader, with the balm and fortitude of your existence—would decrepitate and pass away into smoke and dust.

CHAPTER I.
Prelude.

The existence of Man in the geological period that preceded the one we live in, in his full anthropoid reality, possessing a mind, self conscious, radiant with powers of creation, of language, of inquisition, has been established. Man, vested with his essential attributes and physiologically and psychologically erect, as a peculiar dissonant and discrete living thing lived and died in the Quarternary Day of this Earth. The proof is incontestible. The fact is fixed to-day in the records of scientific assertion and discovery.

Doubtfully realized at first, it has been slowly established through the heaping up of successive proofs, that in the waning years of that geological section of time called the Ice Age, man had begun this slow conquest of the earth.

All geological periods are text book accidents, or professional conveniences. The diorama of geological change was a continuous evolution of physics and topography, the rolling ages did not halt at sectional points, the mechanism of Creation did not stop at intervals to permit the introduction of a new set of designs and preparations, a new web of structural fancies and ideas, a new modus operandi and a new modus vivendi.

Neither can we contend for moments of catastrophic intervention and the sudden release of Omnipotent mandates, sweeping away what had previously lived, and inundating the regions of life with irruptions of new forms.

The movement of life beginning within the recesses of Archæan time went on in its progress from a few centres of creation, until as age succeeded age, and the first utterances of life began to fill the voids of ocean and land, the kingdoms of animal being slowly possessed the earth.

And yet it is also true that the course of organic evolution in the records of palæontology expresses an Intention accomplishing its purpose under resistance. It conforms in the phenomena it presents to the conception of a Mind pursuing a purpose with an accelerated motion as that purpose was approached. For what is that record of extinct life?

From the first scintillations of life in the Cambrian era to the last contributions of Zoic energy in the Tertiaries, we see a succession of ascending stages of life, a series of zoological platforms which are linked together by a stairway of organisms passing from one to the next, and separated by a disappearance of forms which never reappear. Resistance is periodically overcome, but by it the intention of a Supreme Mind to produce the highest and widest and deepest life is forced into a display of creative energy.

In the earlier ages—the Palæozoic—the invertebrates appear in greater numbers, and the lower orders of plants, and only the preparatory groups of the vertebrates force their prophetic outlines in view, the invertebrates and plants begin in more generalized forms, and advance to the more specialized, which are the higher.

As the intention is to embrace higher zoological and structural ideas, this again awakens resistance, and we see its gradual repulse. These periodic floodings or gushes of forms of life, as the brachiopods in the Silurian, the trilobites in the upper Potsdam, and crustacea in modern seas, the bivalves in the Devonian, the crinoids in the Lower Carboniferous, the echinoids in the Cretaceous, the cephalopods and reptiles in the Jurassic, the gastropods and mammals in the Tertiaries, are the wide escape of a propulsive intention as it overcomes resistance, which it has undermined or repelled by processes of development, slowly and unintermittently inaugurated long before.

Premonitions of these outbursts are found before they come, in the genera and orders of the preceding era. So striking is this that it has led M. Naudin, a French naturalist, with no theological hobbies or convictions, to propound, on the evidence, the analogous idea, that a force of variation or origination of forms has acted rhythmically or unintermittently, because each movement was the result of the rupture of an equilibrium, the liberation of a force which till then was retained in a potential state, by some opposing force or obstacle, overcoming which, it passes to a new equilibrium, and so on.

Hence stages of dynamic activity and static repose, of origination of species and types, alternated with periods of stability or fixity. The time-piece does not run down regularly, but “la force procede par saccades; et par pulsation d’autant plus energiques que la nature etait plus près de son commencement.”

Now, it is a remarkable circumstance, strengthening the Doctrine of Intention, that the vast length of time involved in the progress of the Palæozoic Ages was employed in establishing the kingdoms of invertebrate life, and that as at its close, the vertebrate type was reached (in which resided the potential power of the highest development) the Supreme Will rose swiftly to its object—Man, his powers and destiny!

Resistance accumulated against the flow of that intention, and by obstruction attempted to close its exit into the pregnant channel of vertebrate forms. This resistance was slowly dissipated through the prolific avenues of invertebrate life. And the Intending Mind, having ushered in the vertebrates, thence proceeds with rapidity through its evolving phases to complete its organic purpose, creating Man, and pushing in upon the world’s stage the vast psychic consequences of this supreme result.

And Man is reached—When! How! Where! The figures of men are observed stealing along the banks of the swollen Somme, in northern France, in the twilight of an Arctic day. The river, exasperated by the continuous contributions of cold streams rushing from distant summits that still retain the remnants of the shrinking burden of the northern ice sheet, washes the high levels with its turbid waves. Squalid shelters hide the rude domesticities of these skin-coated and tangle-haired aborigines of the earth, these mysterious tenants of the unconquered virgin world in whose crania lies the potency of art and science. Through the long mist of time they move like spectral groups presented to us, as dumb figures mechanically manipulated upon a distant stage. They use the motions of men engaged in play, in fishing, in mending nets, in repelling enemies, in rude wrestling, in working points of stone, or carving ivory, in erecting low-roofed houses, in cleaning skins, in felling trees and engaging in rapid navigation on the calamitous and groaning stream before them. Women are seen here and there amongst them, and children; faces stir with laughter, gesticulation accompanies the dumb motion of their lips. It is an imaginative kinetoscope wherein sound has vanished, and motion only, articulate throughout with human adaptibility, remains before our eyes. We are watching the pre-Adamites.

Again we see men moving in scattered bands along the banks of the Delaware, in New Jersey. The river, widely extended, has invaded the outlying country in broad, lake-like arms, and only at narrowing throats between cliffs and resistant ledges does the confined flood raise a murmur of expostulation as it churns in flying spray against its gneissoid barriers. Ice, in broad, deep cakes, or low piled up hummocks, or occasional castellated ice hills carrying stones upon their surface, appear over the wave-scurried waters, and now and then from some concealed inlet, a rude dug-out moves cautiously, piloted by strong arms, crossing between the struggling fragments of ice to gain, in a series of hesitating advances, the opposite shore. Human figures disembark, they climb up the bank by a half-worn escalade of steps rudely dug into the frozen gravel and sand, and disappear in the black opening of a cave excavated in the cliff faces, and overhung by the projecting angles of an irregular boulder of rock, half imbedded and half exposed, in the morainal mass of earth and pebbles, sand and stone.

The country for leagues about is desolate; in its denuded state it exposes to the scowling sky its torn areas, furrowed with gulches, heaped up cairns, plains strewn with loosened stones, while stranded along a distant coast line and gleaming in titanic splendor, far beyond on remote terraces, are icebergs. They are tumbling in decay before a sun more southern than their origin, and contributing a hundred rivulets, spreading fan-like in lines of silver over the flat declines about them, meandering to the gray shores, deserted by an ebbing tide.

The rigors of the Ice Age in its extremest form have passed, and here, in its lingering epoch of control, man, inventive, apt, procreative and vocal, holding the augury of the civilized ages advancing towards him, is seen.

Seen amid a waste of which he is a part, but from which by no conceivable dream of transformation was he evolved. The moment of his birth on earth was more propitious. Nature cradled him somewhere beneath other skies, warmer suns and blossoming life. He has survived the Ice Age. His adaptive nature has met it, as it crept like some continental torpor over the fair world it supplanted. He has lived through and out of it. He has kept alive on earth in the awful desolation of this menace and assassination, his inherited flame of intelligence, and the primal instincts of man. Before the Ice Age, man was.

Again in the broad savannahs of the Mississippi Valley man is discovered, where its waters, confluent with the broad streams flowing from Missouri and Ohio, spread in sluggish lake-like expanses, stirred by the river flow into movement, around archipelagoes of low islands. The waves of this water met the retreating frontier of the ice-cap, vociferous with the fall of shivered icebergs, and washed on one hand the lowlands of Appalachia, yet glistening from snow-buried crests, and the emergent domes of the Rocky Mountains, on the other, yet flecked with scattered citadels of ice, resisting extermination in valley-bowls and precipice-lined declivities.

The scene wears a softened aspect. The low islands have retained a cheerful growth of trees, and amongst them flowering bushes and patches of keen-colored flowers invite rest and dreams. Glades pass across the larger domains of insulated land; white beeches shine beneath trees, whose shadows are thrown in meshes of crossing lines and figures upon them, and a blazing sun, set in the zenith, administers to the wide expanse a temperate splendor. And here man again moves across the foreground of our vision. He is less weirdly strange and aboriginal, less dumb and impenetrable, and, as he stands alone upon a projecting tip of sand, with an erect beauty, a touch of decoration in his dress shows he has outgrown the dogged stupor of animal life. The charms of emotion have also awakened him; we hear, over the waters, the long musical halloo of a calling voice, and somewhere rising from the tufted wilderness answering voices in sweet sopranos return the salutation.

He turns to the meridian sun, and fear clouds his face. Across the sunlight a darkening blot has arisen. Its whirling and tempestuous shapes change from second to second—a murmur in the air, made visible by a thousand increasing ripples on the blinded water, tells of some approaching storm. The man has dropped upon his knees, the struggling lines of his face, as he watches the black cloud, deepen into a rigid expression of terror. Now the waves roll heavily upon the beach, the light is extinguished, and there descends a rain of dust. It thickens until the air is impenetrable, the man, prostrate upon his face, is lost to sight. The verdurous islands disappear, and the descending Loess dust extinguishes the sun.

It is another phase of human life in the vast backward of time, when the dust and dirt deposits of the Mississippi, and its tributary valleys, were accumulating as the ice fled northward. Again Man comes into our view, the same identity of thought and form, which makes the hero and the lover, the fundamental consciousness developed, as in you and me.

We move westward to where the Sierra Nevada Valley Mountains breast the Sacramento Valley, and nod to the answering summons of the Coast Range, where the rays that empurple the sawed edges of the Sierras dip the peaks of the coast in roseate halos.

A sunburst from the gathered edges of a thunderstorm reveals upon a platform of rock, that sticks out from the mountain side like a lozenge from a cake, a group of sunburnt men and women. Somewhat higher up and behind them a circle of low covers made of boughs, woven together and rudely thatched, indicates their simple homes. The place of their sojourn has been propitiously, even tastefully chosen. It is a somewhat scattered woodland, made up of colossal cone-bearing trees, that seem located at such even distances apart that their contact creates over the ground beneath them a softened twilight, though the sun at its zenith pours over their motionless and dependent boughs its full effulgence. The spot forms a terrace upon the ascending areas of a great mountain chain whose highest and peaked ridges glisten from distant snowfields.

Before this group of silent people, far below them in the broad valley of the present Sacramento, a scene of incomparable interest and beauty is displayed. They seem absorbed in its contemplation, and to their eyes perchance its varied features appeal with a force symptomatic of all the intense delight the poet or the artist would to-day feel before the return of its exciting and marvellous incidents.

It is a critical moment in the vast drama of orogenic change, which has built the continent; one act in that procession of acts, which moulded the surface of the earth into habitable forms, and etched its surface with the beauty of design.

The broad physiographic trough upon which these mountain denizens are gazing has become an area of conflict. The volcanic forces of the earth are even now engaged in making monumental deformations, and here below them they watch the splendid crisis of an engagement between the lava-rock welling from the furnaces of the earth’s interior, and the flashing currents of foam-filled water. Let us trace the picture.

On one side of the broad depression, filled to its farthest marge with intermittent forest-land, broad backs of alluvial sand, and seamed with sparkling rivers, rise the myriad summits of a long range of mountains torn by time and deeply bitten into picturesque contrasts of ravine, gorge, canyon, buttes and facetted pinnacles of stone. Far over the wide valley, scarcely seen, but still like a shadow upon the horizon, is the western limit of this quarternary basin, another line of hills, less wonderful, younger, and rather monotonously low.

The landscape disappears northward in bare regions that are hidden in clouds of mist, and far southward, and to the west, spectators just discern the limits of the Salt Sea. But it is upon the marvels beneath them that their eyes are fixed, eyes that are yet more quickly arrested by sensation, by the brusque struggles of natural forces, than by the alluring distance, shimmering hot beneath the noon-day sun.

Almost immediately beneath their feet, though on the level of the general valley, is a river bed, which, deserted by its former tenant, still holds dwindling lakes of water, somewhat connected, like a string of opal dishes, by filaments of thin and feeble rivulets. At a point north of them and fixed to their attention upon the mountain side by a dull murmurous succession of detonations, and splintering gashes in the rock, a pasty exudation of molten rock slips down in black lines or faintly rubescent streaks, and, uniting in an invading tongue of slaggy fusion, has entered the river valley, which is now, at its first courses, filled from rim to rim with half liquid scoria.

The lithic tide is carried on in a sluggish simulation of water currents, rolling over in its advance, or spurting in sudden liquid torrents from swelling concretions; now caught by the asperities of the channel, and now flowing faster at its unimpeded centre, dragged out in liguous coils and ropes of lava, and again, down some steeper declivity, tumbling in a shaggy cataract of braids, tortuous links, and vermiculate confusion. Beneath the mute group the igneous outburst has reached a pond, one of the derelict lakes along the river’s deserted way, and it is the fierce conflict thus begun which holds them in a rapt posture, like modelled images. As the flowing rock enters the lake with slow and even step, or spills into it, in flocks of bubbling slag, from its higher decrepitating surfaces, explosion follows explosion; the water is ejected in spurts of spray, and falling backward over the hot and half consolidated magma, flashes into steam. Rising clouds of vapor conceal the exact limits of the invasion, and points of contact, but the coarse rumble, the intermittent gushes of water upward, the far away reverberations of the earth’s opening crust, and the quivering pulsations that shake the table rock on which our spectators are standing, announce the new geological chapter in the world’s making, the last catastrophe before the earth lies quiet and smiling at the feet of men.

As they turn away in frightened dismay, the sunlight flashes from their tawny necks, their girdled arms and ankles, and from the bunched tresses of their dark hair, flashes from gold. They are the gold ornaments formed in naive and curious ways which these early children of the earth filched from the stream beds, that soon, before their gaze, from shore to shore, will be wedged tight with black dikes of rock, holding down the sealed bonanzas, until in Time’s own time the life of a later day shall search the primeval sands again, and dress its beauty too with the same entrancing glitter.

The picture disappears, but we are standing where the Calaveras Skull, the discovery of human implements beneath the Table Mountains of California have proven that Man was a witness of these geognostic changes in the great internal valley of that state.

Shall we pursue the western trail of men’s birth, bending our eyes upon the mysterious regions of southeastern Asia, where perhaps a too inquisitive scrutiny will reveal the very beginnings of the human tribe?

We have no reason to go further. We have observed the changing aspect of man from the edges of the ice sheet in western Europe and eastern North America, his ameliorated habits in the loess valley of the Mississippi and Missouri. In the far west where the contemporaneous climatic conditions were milder, or even conjoined with phases that were semi-tropic we have found him, at the same time that farther north, and pervasively to the east, frigid or boreal aspects prevailed.

It is with the story of Love, told of these strange and remote periods of Time, that we are now concerned, and we place the Woman of the Ice Age far in the West, somewhere not exposed to the extreme arctic vicissitudes of a glacial imprisonment, although not quite beyond the rumors and tokens of its partial survival, nor quite within the lassitudes of a southern and perennial summer, but at a possible point of such picturesque contrasts, of such organic fascination, of such compromises in physical expression, that we may discern in her the elements of poetry, elements born of her response to Nature’s vitality and variousness, and with them elements of passion born of her inheritance of blood instincts, which had formed in her ancestors, under the same diversity of natural features. In Her, prehistoric and primal, the type of all women since, we shall find the instinct of love, evincing its supremacy over her nature, holding her before the mirror of her own vanity, rousing her to the extremest verge of her emotional design and activity, nursing her on the breast of its satisfaction, and filling her life with the currents of its amorous expectations.

CHAPTER II.
The Place.

It was a region of splendid contrasts. A continental zone which presented in the wide range of its mere longitudinal extent a succession of physical features that were opposite and embraced a variety of climate, that by reason of meteorological diversity had carved and dressed those physical features into a series of natural wonders.

Far to the north rose a group of mountain peaks, so arranged that they appeared like successive steps of ascent to the swelling dome, central and dominant, over its gathered satellites, each of which was marvellous alone, but in this association seemed forgotten or remembered only as it increased by contrast the majesty of the great mountain mass it attended.

This superb elevation was itself broken up into radiating chasms, whose rocky sides rose in black keels of relief above the snow filled gorges they defined, while surmounting them all a keen shaft of granite, roseate in a hundred lights, or wrapped in pendulous and waving veils of mist, climbed steeply to the clouds.

The crowded and crushed snow masses, nevé-like emerged upon all the lower shoulders of the huge crest in glacial fields of ice. Here their Arctic currents, sweeping around the lower summits, were reinforced by new accessions, springing from these lesser altitudes, which in confusion poured upon them, and by many avenues of obstruction and accidents of interference, repulse and rupture, converted the great multiplied ice zone, encircling the whole congery of peaks, and plunging outward over vertical escarpments to lower levels, into a stupendous spectacle of chaos. Icebergs crossed their pinnacles in the descent, the riven ice stream ejected blocks of ice hundreds of feet in length, and the split glacier, seamed by colossal cleavages to the abysses of its rocky floor, displayed its green depths. Detonations rose upon the air, caught by the waiting winds and drifted southward over the wild plains, the long indented coast and the far interior canons; south to forest lands and waving grass savannahs, while near at hand its rough roar startled the sleeping mastodon and brought terror to men.

From this glory, which in the Sun of that strange day shone like a titanic crown of jewels, the land areas fell suddenly away, and expanded southward into a long sea margin on the west, and arid and rocky wildernesses on the east, where deep canyons with vertical walls, a thousand feet high, held in their dark bosoms the frigid waters from the northern glaciers. An intermediate region, between the palisaded or tenuous coast-line and these mysterious untenanted rents and time, wind and water worn ravines, revealed scenes more mild and radiant, wherein the apparel of nature was more colored, and where she bore those features of appropriate beauty where river and lake, forest land and flowered field unite in their abundance to appeal to the hearts of men.

This hospitable land was varied. It slowly liberated itself, like an escaping captive, from the desolation of the East, where the plains were broken with chilled lava beds, jagged peaks, asperities of stone, standing like geologic spectres, canyons holding emprisoned and viewless rivers, wide and gloomy lakes around whose margins the struggling relics of an extinct flora seemed slowly confessing their defeat before phases of climate less lenient than their predecessors. It freed itself from broad depressions, the beds of ancient lakes swept by freezing winds from the northern ice country, and bare and empty, exposing to the sky their orb-like circumference, ghastly with white alkaline encrustation, like the pallid optic of a great leviathan, whitened with the films of decomposition.

From all this area, rigid with the articulate expression of Death, a land to the West began its fertile margins, tentatively uttering a new design, with grass grown hills, low vegetation, and modest, scarcely obvious brooks, loosening themselves in placid currents from the highlands. Then, as if it felt the assurance of an improving destiny, woods rose over ranges of increasing altitude, rivers swept in circling glory through narrow and alluvial valleys, and groves of great trees clustered over mountain terraces, defiled in green seas of leafy glory to the lowlands, where the rhythm of verdurous beauty was resumed in more open country, the reincarnated spirit of Nature loosened its power upon a coast line, washed by the restless ocean.

The coast was strangely beautiful. Wide coves paved with argent or golden sands opened the straight lines of its rocky and lofty shores with broad emarginations. These inviting bays, defended by crowning capes or jutting and attenuated peninsulas of dethroned basaltic columns, formed peaceful harbors wherein the fleeing surges of the sea often came to rest in limpid pulsations; or else, with diminished power, but greater speed and imposing crescent beauty, rolled upon them in avalanches of spray. The land came down to these charming regions in undulating surfaces, sometimes deeply wooded, though often more artificially indented with scattered or solitary trees. Not infrequently it accompanied, in its descent, the devious flow of rivers, expanding into estuaries of such proportions that the fleet of a modern nation might have floated safely within their borders.

The smaller coves furnished a more minute and exquisite interest. Here partially degraded escarpments of stone walled them in with steep ascents of talus, over which ambitious vegetation, almost baffled in its encounter with sea fogs and saline breezes, produced an irregular covering of green, and displayed the ample ingenuity of its struggle. This ingenuity was shown in the twisted roots of trees holding, like closed fists enwrapped boulders, by roots penetrating at obtuse angles the split surfaces of the palisades, or, entangled in a knot of mutually helpful buttresses, suspending some adventurous pine at a sharp angle above the splashing and murmurous tides below it. The dazzlingly clear water in these darkened and umbrageous coves, revealed with every shaft of light, the broad fronds of algae, floating like aprons in green sheets, rising upon dark stem-like roots from the cold waters. Here, upon the sides of detached masses of rock, sported companies of sea lions, their gleaming and undulated flanks formed for an instant into motionless groups of beauty, to be dissolved the next moment in revels of wreathed confusion. Far out beyond the shore, domes of rock, just covered by each swelling wave, broke the surface with areas of foam, and again beyond these stood, as the last vestige of the eroded coast frontier, some needle of stone, in whose fugitive and vanishing shadows sea-gulls rested, that again, by a sudden access of volition, swept over it in clouds of ascending and descending plumes.

The coast-line was itself the index of a varied origin. For miles the palisades of dark or frowning trap dikes rose precipitously above the tide, their columnar formation yielding only a stubborn concession to the incessant labors of air and ocean, though the scenic marvel of cathedral spires and excavated reverberating sea caves, left by their retreat, excused the tardy surrender to decay.

Wherever the sedimentary strata of slate or limestone, frequently but half consolidated, and therefore more easily attacked, formed the land surfaces, the country descended gently to the sea, and swept backward with dissected features to the coast ranges, gleaming distantly. Through these tracts the beds of rivers were formed, and their currents, under two contrasted phases, appeared upon the coast-line. They either flowed through degraded valleys, slowly expanding into the broad estuarine coves mentioned before, or, unable to reach the easily attacked mineral beds, and forced to flow outward upon the surface of dense igneous rocks, leaped into the sea by cascades walled in somber gorges, or broke with sudden splendor over precipices of unchanged basalt.

In that pleistocene day the region, now summoned before the eye by the familiar process of adaptive reconstruction, shrunk far northward into low lying and frigid plains, narrowly escaping, by their slight differential elevation, submergence from the western ocean. In this uninviting northland, which lay like a neck of transition between the ice mountains and their glacial precincts still farther north, and the southern country, scattered forests of scrub willow, beech and spruces, alternated with sand flats, cold bogs, and cairn-like moraines of stone and gravel. The latter, swept by ice winds, drenched in snow and rains, darkened by thunder clouds or lit by momentary blazes of the sun, held the resistant remnants of the ice sheet, as tottering and stranded fractions perched upon their harsh shoulders. They exposed gulches, radiating from their summits, each occupied by momentary torrents of water, from the melting ice cap, which, often collecting in lower basins, formed extended semi-glacial lakes, hesitatingly bordered by a thin growth of herbs, and in sections connected by narrow straits into chains of untenanted and gloomy pools.

Through the monotony of this wilderness wandered herds of the mastodon, and here on the edges of the frosted lakes stood the primeval elephant, the mammoth of those swiftly receding days now scarcely penetrated by the vision of science and imagination.

These faunal restorations were yet further extended. To the east of this inhospitable and terrible zone, in cold and almost treeless sections scarred by ravine and canon, and trending upward into the abyssal recesses of the mountains, the cave bear secured an abiding home.

South over the edges of that sweeter land in which the crowded life of plants and animals, evicted from its northern habitat by the exactions of the cold, now strained its activity and device to maintain a simultaneous existence, in this prolific country, the pleistocene horse ranged in thronging bands. He scarcely impinged on the high terrains where the sabre-toothed tiger dwelt, but by preference traversed the grassy campus, following the streams, where their widened valleys, recently formed, were uninvaded by the forests, and sometimes forced an inquisitive path over the high country to the margins of the ocean.

A meteorological complexity reflected and rivalled all of these contrasts of position and occupation, and from within the sealed envelope of the earth’s crust, also, movements and voices responded to the ceaseless alternations of heat and cold, tempest and silence, serene and raging hours.

The warm southern winds sweeping from the broad Carribean Continent, gathering moisture from the wide gulf of the Mississippi, reached these more northern regions dense with saturation, and were suddenly chilled by rarefaction as they were lifted into higher elevations by the low lying flood of cold air, pouring in from the glaciated poles. The contact zone between these displaced masses of hot and moisture-laden air, and the underlying frosted and more slowly drifting atmosphere precipitated a meteorological violence, an exorbitant vigor of meteorological phenomena. Then ensued the tumult of storm and electrical perturbation.

The rivers rose upon their banks, the sinister and blackened skies emptied their bosoms of their watery contents, avalanches rolled down the mountain sides, the air smitten with a thousand forks of lightning vibrated with the internal electric charges that evoked all the echoes of canyon, peak and plain. Cyclonic winds tore through the forests and bent the crowded heads of the trees. Then the marshalled clouds fled in torrents of rain or were dissipated in the dazzling warfare, and then turquoise skies bent over the washed lands, a summer sun opened the petals of innumerable flowers, the cool air scarcely lifted from the ground the scent of its warm palpitations, and, to the detonations of the storm, succeeded the still unpacified but vanishing roar of the overladen streams.

In winter the petrifying touch of cold descended from the margins of the glaciers, and the denuded trees, the snow blankets of the higher land, the stilled streams and the pale skies imparted a sepulchral stare to the shrunk soil that turned its dead face upward to its leaden dome.

To the excitement and changes of external nature the unadjusted equilibria of the interior of the earth contributed new and dangerous surprises—earthquakes threw down the cliffs into foaming rivers, shook loose from their prehensile bases the towering pines upon the hillsides, or started in repetition the sundered strata from the mountains, and changed the face of nature with scarred exposures and inundated valleys. The earth opened along shivering seams, and the exuded lava rising from centres of stupendous pressure poured out in belts its half consolidated magmas.

Volcanic vents broke their seals and the uprushing tides of gas and steam and cinders turned the day to night, and signalized the distant craters with voluminous wreathes and columns and ash-filled whirlwinds; sometimes in a fierce intoxication of chaotic incident, emptying upon surrounding snowfields their hot and scorching rains.

Thus nature wore all the wardrobe of her almost exhaustless store, displayed all the properties of her acquisitions through ages of geological change, and assembled the most startling devices for awakening attention and vitalizing motion.

She seemed at this point on the earth’s surface so to arrange and direct her vast physical resources for rousing the mind, charging the heart, and stiffening the will, that the new being, arising from its cradle, and beginning the task of occupying the world, might be suddenly endowed with mind and heart and will, so vigorously organized, as to make that conquest easy.

Amidst these wide contrasts of climate and scene, of internal and external energy, of products and denizens, lived a race of prehistoric men and women thinly scattered in villages over the shoulders, the valleys and the alluvial terraces of the Sierra Nevadas in Central California, at a point where a broad ingress of the sea swept past the degraded and depressed Coast Ranges. Here, from the startling and multiplied expressions of nature, the full influence of environment encompassed at an impressionable instant the dawning powers, the pulses of its primal heat, the mental movements, the suddenly erected passions of this Glacial and Occidental Man, this strange and almost silent creature, appearing from the unknown, and moving forward on the listless feet of the centuries towards the powers and civilization of the orient.

Broadly reviewed, we have for the stage of this prehistoric drama, its pictures and stirring scenes of adventure and haphazard perils, the arctic glacial zone, the canyon country on the East, the Fair Land on the West and South, and beyond the unchanging ocean, as primal then as when it swept its fluctuating waves over Archaean ledges.

The particular place where our eyes discover, in this vast area, the movements of men, was situated in a grove of giant trees upon an upland that formed a terrace on the sides of a mountain range almost wooded to its summit, where the dwindling vegetation exposed the naked precipices of an abrupt and overhanging crest. In front of the upland the ground slipped suddenly down in slanting and again vertical faces of rock and soil to a sort of bottom land, a long elliptical depression holding at its lower end a basin of water, which, as it indicated no visible source of supply, must have been fed from the streams formed in the heavy rain-falls, or from the springs issuing over its hidden floor. The land rose in a low swell beyond this, and upon the margin of the latter elevation the possible inhabitant gazed upon the sea from the edge of an intrusive dike of rock, which, wall-like, rose along the edge of the western wave, its anterior face marked in most places by rising piles of fragmental rock.

Northward it rose to steeper heights whose unencumbered exposures made sheer precipices above the frothing billows sweeping in at their feet. The grass crept to the very verge of these dizzy elevations, the mist rolled down upon them at moments, and again they described angular apices of dark stone against the clear blue or cloud flecked zenith. From these latter pinnacles of observation the Fair Land with its mountains and rivers and valleys could be well discerned on the east, and the glittering spire of the ice mountain with its wide skirts of ice imperfectly descried northward.

At the moment of time when the retrospective and imaginative eye of this narrator fell upon the secluded upland, mentioned above, a path led down to the valley and its lake, a path somewhat precariously conducted over overhanging walls of rock. It crossed the valley almost lost to sight in tall grass, rose upon the lower swell and seemed to carry its adventuresome follower straight over the edge of the trap dike into the sea.

A little reckless exploration would have shown, however, that it led to no such useless and careless termination. It became on the face of the trap dike a very broken and disjointed path indeed, but still a path.

It became a ladder of rocky steps, which, if successfully followed, brought the traveller to a beach of water-worn and rounded pebbles, which again southward disappeared into a more extended sand plain. Behind this sand plain the dike precipice visibly dwindled, until it too disappeared beneath the folds of a sparsely wooded shore. To any human eye, perhaps unwontedly addicted to piercing the air with its long vision, there would have been discerned far out to sea a line of foaming breakers careering upon jagged backs of rock, and again even beyond this, like ghosts, white ice-bergs, tilted or erect, following each other in a spectral march.

On the upland where the path we have thus traced to the shore, began, somewhat withdrawn into the shadows of the colossal trunks of trees, were a few covered spaces made habitable by skins and boughs of trees. Their design, if design could be applicable to so undesigned a structure, consisted in a few posts lightly driven in the soil, connected at their upper ends by long sapling stems, which were again connected by crossed boughs, on which the lesser twigs were left undisturbed, and on this light webbing were piled more boughs and leaves until the accumulation assumed a mounded shape. By the fertility of nature, seeds, falling in this nidus of gradually accumulating leaf mould, had started into life, and, augmented through the years, had converted it into a sort of herbal patch, which in the season of blossoming became gay and radiant with flowers.

Beneath this ornamental roof the slender equipment of an aboriginal camp was spread. A rude crane suspended from the roof, at a point where a chimney-like opening had been made in the surplusage of leaves and boughs, supported a stone vessel, pendent from it by cords of tree fibre or coarse grass. The stone vessel was blackened by repeated exposure to the dull fires made from leaves and peat moss, and resembled the few others which, discarded and broken, seemed carefully laid aside at one corner of this well ventilated apartment. The only other noticeable furnishment of the room were the skins of foxes and bears, rankly oleaginous and discolored, thrown down around the central fire place, where were gathered in a disorderly pile a few stone axes with wooden handles, some awkwardly made bows, and a few delicately chipped blades of stone, neatly united to shafts of wood by means of a black pitch.

No walls enclosed this defective suggestion of a house, and only on one side hung a woven mat of natural fibre hideously bedaubed with red paint or iron ochre, most shockingly constrained to portray a portentous animal rising hobby-horse like on its hind and abnormally lengthened legs.

It was thirty thousand years, more or less, before the birth of Christ that a woman stood leaning against one of the four corner posts of this simple habitation at the widened and worn opening of the highland path described above, and gazed upward to the sky, in whose sapphire depths the rising sun of day had begun to form clouds, sucked up from the broad western ocean.

CHAPTER III.
Lhatto—The Woman.

Ageless woman! The beckoning centuries seem to run before her tireless energies, still stretching forward the span of her sublime motherhood, still exacting the tribute of her sons and daughters to meet the needs of History!

She becomes in retrospect the origin of human life, the vast procreative source of all civilization and all progress, and from her bosoms, clutched by the fixed hand of infancy, flows the milk that has formed the tissues of all known human annals.

Prophecy dwells upon her head, for from her proceed the nations of the earth. Poetry and Drama surround her, for she, in her evocative charm, haunts the innermost chambers of Desire, and it is her touch that lights the fires, else unseen, upon each altar of Passion, of Aspiration, of Revelry, of Joy.

Nature is her antitype, and in Nature as in a mirror she sees the multiplied reflections of her own beneficence and her own fertility. She rules in the vestiture of Man’s Empress, and the flood of time yet bears upon its tides the meanings of her presence and her powers.

Immortal Woman! in whose dowry Intention has placed all things beautiful and tender, around whose neck hang the prayers of men, and from whose eyes shine the rewards of men; she who by a welcome paradox makes her weakness the unmastered ruler of men, and whose promises are the last incentives to their ambition.

In the metaphors of Revelation she stands revealed as the victim of her own surrender to enjoyment, and through a miraculous genesis of life she is enthroned upon the seat of Mercy, as the vehicle of Man’s restoration.

And this Primal Woman? Shall such panegyric belong to her? She stands upon the threshold. Behind her the depths and mists of Oblivion—before her Man’s Empire over Life. Let us see.

As we watch her thus beaming and looking upward, she springs forward into a patch of light made by the sun’s descending rays through some aperture in the boughs of the high trees. Her beauty is revealed. She is not tall, but the tense vigor of her muscles, all uncovered and shining in the sun like a golden bronze, gives her superb frame, modelled with a charm of outline born of exercise, an imposing expression. She is not voluptuous, but the graded and blending surfaces of her body—softly tinted with that indescribable color that becomes an embrowned bronze, alive in the shadows, and a lustrous metallic sheen in the high lights—form a picture of enticement. The swollen excrescences of breast and hips, repulsive to all adroit and delicate desire, are replaced by refined outlines, sexual in meaning, but restrained to the limits of sculptural modesty. Her neck sweeps deliciously upward from the bare shoulders, imprinted with the kisses of the sun, bearing a head, perhaps small but exquisitely adjusted, and displaying features puzzling in their type, and suggestive of the subtle union of the American, the Negroid and the Malayan.

The nose aquiline, but thinly ridged and faintly expanding into nervous and sensitive nostrils, the lips full and pouting, yet short, the eyes half limpid and dark, but carrying flashes of defiance, the forehead low, the cheeks oval and delicately hollowed, the ears small and just obviously inverted, and the chin abrupt and firmly built; the whole composition lending itself to a range of expressions from languor to anger and repudiation. Nor was it deprived of less extreme shades of meaning. As she stood in the light, her eyebrows arched in attention, the smooth skin between them disturbed by a few lines of indecision and her lips parted in expectation, she leaned forward, and a look of infinite interest, a strange pained thoughtfulness arose in her face. She raised her hands as if in oblation to the light above her, her tumultuous black hair streamed down her naked back, and she sighed.

The poise was perfect, the aesthetic unity complete. Gold bands held her ankles, gold links were upon her wrists and ears, a white shell comb was inserted in her hair, and an apron of fox skin hung before her. Such was Lhatto, the girl of the Sierras, before human history began, the Woman of the Ice Age, living in the warm Fair Land in North America.

We are not concerned in proving the reasonableness of this fair vision. Eve has been made beautiful by Art. Why not Lhatto by Fiction? And why not beautiful indeed? Child of Nature, nurtured amidst its beauties, trained in the many ways of earning life from its free gifts, dispensing with all artifices of living, gathering strength, and color, form, feeling and passion from the splendor of Nature’s panorama and action. The wonderfulness of such panorama and action was in this temperate and tropic and frigid zone unsurpassed. Why not find in these first Earthlings some impassioned instance—accident it might be—of Creation’s early effort to reflect,—as if in sportive prophecy of all Woman should be thereafter,—the approaching terrors and glories of her reign in history and story, in play and legend, poetry and music.

Lhatto stood an instant longer in the sun. Then, as if regulating her movements by some carefully conceived purpose, she turned back to the sylvan camp and drew from a rude receptacle, fashioned from the trunk of a tree, a more complete covering, seized a harpoon-like weapon from the ground, crowded a pemmican mass of cooked grain and smoked meat into a woven basket, rudely ornamented with figures, and turning backward spoke to the moving figures of men and women far off in the perspective of the forest.

Her voice belonged to and fitted all her natural charm. It was musical and jubilant with woody sweetness, and a lingering ring, like the melting and penetrating calls of birds. It made her more beautiful.

“To the water,” she cried, and the passive figures, scarcely arrested in their toil, answered back with murmurs of assent. Lhatto turned again, and Atalanta-like, sped down the path that started at the upland and ended on the distant shore.

She carried her clothing and the food basket, pressed in a bundle close beneath her left arm, while her hand held the harpoon, her right hand was raised before her and like a Grecian herald, “she ran swiftly.” She soon reached the edge of the upland where the path descended to the valley and the lake. Here her agility and sure footedness were seriously tested. The broken descent was a series of intervals between rough and angular blocks of stone, slippery with lichens or moss, and now wet from some recent shower. The path with long interruptions where no evidence of its direction could be seen, was detected by worn spots or traces, upon the larger blocks. Lhatto seemed to exert no thought upon the selection of her way. With light feet she sprang from point to point, and running along the narrow edge of some decumbent mass of rock, suddenly dropped from its side to a lower level without volition, so vigorous and just was her instinct of place and action.

She had reached the valley; the high grass nurtured by some favorable influence reached half way up to her own height and pressed upon her. Its swaying ran in radial waves outward from her vanishing figure, as her laggard arm, now thrown behind her, swept its mobile crests. Suddenly she emerged on the dome beyond, bare or scantily dressed in verdure, and here her figure became instantly and superbly visible.

A wind blowing freshly from the sea, and now chilling and raw, brushed backward the glistening hair, color throbbed in her cheeks with a deeper dye, her bosom pulsating with the efforts of her unusual exertion rose and fell, and to her eyes had risen some suppressed emotion that gave them brilliancy; her lips, after a moment’s pause while her uplifted head, with a sort of statuesque elation, greeted the blue sky, opened suddenly with song.

Or was it but a cry, a weird inchoate yearning for music’s melody and rhythm?

It rose upon the air of that immeasurably distant day, and floated out over the waves that were making their own rudimental symphonies on the lonely shores. It rose upward and floated backward to the forests where the birds in myriad ways were beating the same air, on which it came, with song. It was part of the intuition of all feeling things to put their feelings into the subtle measure of music. And she who sang had come upon earth before civilization or science or art, in formal types, had yet been dreamed of. It was the prototype of folk song, or nursery croon, of legendary melodies, of national anthem, the song of Lhatto, on the outskirts of all regulated thought and invention.

Imagine—all you who behind foot-lights, and in front of crescent platforms, hear the manifold choruses that shall in some way, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes clear, interpret for you feeling or fancy, that use all the sound resources of orchestras straining in all imaginable ways to construct new fabrics of notes, building in echoes of old tunes, forgotten lays, choral unions of tones, and hurrying from grave to gay, from slow to quick, in the laborious compilation that rises with elastic buoyancy, until the last chord crashes or sobs, and the listener departs numbed and despairing—imagine Lhatto on the door step of human time singing to the morning skies.

Yes! it was a song. It was articulate. This earliest woman had wedded music to words, and both, in her, perhaps from still more venerable traditions, or from the creative genius of merely strong feeling, were signals of man’s primal worship of the sea, and were intelligible. Thus she sang:—

THE SONG OF LHATTO.

Stay waves. Hold wind. Enough!

Enough! The fish swims on your face,

The fish swims in the deep water,

The clouds swim with the fish,

The sun buries his head there too.

My boat hurts your face,

Your face will eat my boat,

It will swim with the fish

And the clouds, and the sun.

Stop waves. Stop wind. Enough!

Enough!

Let me swim too with the fish,

And the clouds and the sun,

Hurry waves, hurry wind.

The boat I make wounds the

Face of the water. Enough! Enough!

Perhaps it was not music, nor poetry, nor sense, but as the voice shrilly mounted the sloping rocks and called from all their crannies, their hiding nooks, their inviolate grottoes the—till then—unused echoes, the Woman leaped and danced, her bundle dropped from her arm, and with hands outstretched to the ocean, her face radiant and laughing, she swung to and fro, pacing and stamping the ground in a circle.

Then a stranger thing happened, and something more grave and beautiful.

Lhatto knelt and bowed to the far-away sea, and her voice became silent. So the Woman there in the Earth’s Dawn begat music and poetry and worship; the mists from the ocean spread about her, the swarming voices of the day entered her ears, and perchance far down in her perturbed soul, by some skill of the Great Intention, she saw and heard the hurrying centuries rampant with life, pregnant with passion, furious with ambition, prostrate—as she had been before the sea—prostrate before a Woman’s form, and voice, and soul.

Lhatto rose, resumed her burden and hastened to the edge of the cliff where the path abruptly ended in a disjointed natural ladder of stone leading aimlessly, and, as if by preference, dangerously down the vertical face of the dike.

Lhatto certainly felt no diffidence. From point to point she descended with ease, leaping with careless accuracy, and scarcely pausing in her rapid and twisting course. Suddenly her onward motion ceased. She had reached the lowest step visible from the edge of the bluff; below was a long interval, perhaps twenty feet to the rolled pebbles on the beach now rapidly succumbing to the inundation of the inflowing tide.

Her form bent forward. She was scanning the awkward gap, and some exclamation of apparent wonder escaped her. The last step, a conical and half sloping fragment of rock, which had usually afforded the final element in the chain of precarious footholds, had disappeared. Some dislocation had thrown it over, perhaps the assault of a heavy billow, and the distance between her position and the shore was uninterrupted by any intermediate break.

The woman was disconcerted for an instant. But that intuitive response of her muscular and trained body to each quick and adequate decision of her mind was instantly displayed. She flung from her the bundle of clothing, wrapped tightly around the basket of food, and shot the harpoon far off, aiming at a flat exposure of fine sand between the larger boulders. Both disappeared below her. She sank to the narrow shelf on which she had been standing, and with the keenest agility swung down below its edge, suspending her pendant body by her outstretched arms, and then began slowly to sway, each flexure of her back starting a wider amptitude of oscillation, until her feet alternately rose so far as to bring the axis of her body almost parallel with the edge of rock to which she tenaciously clung.

Her design was evident. Immediately below her the fallen boulder lying on its side thrust upward a comb of sharp edges treacherously marked by braids of green sea-weed. To have dropped upon these flinty serrations would have meant a serious injury. To escape it she now essayed to give herself propulsive power sufficient to pass to one side of this obstacle.

In another second of time she had loosened one hand, continuing with the other this supremely difficult exercise, which shot into her face tides of color, and revealed the superb physique, texture and power of her steel-like muscles. She suddenly released her hold when the wide swing had become most extended, and shot, half turning backward, far beyond the threatening boulder, falling with graceful recovery of her inclined body, as the arrest on the shore brought her head upward with the yet unexpended energy of translation. It was a skillful and dexterous feat.

For an instant she covered her face with her hands. The exertion had been significant and unusual. The bundle and harpoon, the latter fixed upright in the sand, were recovered, and with a relaxed, perhaps a slightly halting step, Lhatto made her way over the sea wall of rolled and polished pebbles to the less dismal and barren shores beyond, where a long beach passed upward into dunes, drifted into hillocks, and partially induced to support a scattered wood of dark, motionless, and elongated cedars.

The lonely woman, emblem and promise, stood a long time on that untenanted shore looking outward, the encroaching tide slowly encircling her feet with wavelets, while each advancing ripple bearing some bubble of foam bound her ankles with a ring of airy beads.

Before the ocean, whether in calm or in storm, youth feels the power of its silence and its immensity. The wind that moved over its passionless face when still, the wind that carries hurricanes over the same ocean when convulsed and dangerous, solicit the recreant passions of youth, aimless, boundless, and unfulfilled.

Though speechless its murmurs are the voices of sirens luring him with musical and seducing phrases to enter its green abyss and find delight. The horizon, a merely necessary optical limit, a mathematical certainty, a physical injunction upon eyesight, is to youth a line on the threshold of New Worlds, a doorway to all the pleasures that the leaping heart, with wise madness, craves incessantly.

To the Woman of the Ice Age, to Lhatto, still struggling with the youth of her own life, and struggling more profoundly but unconsciously, and forever inexplicably, with the youth of the race, at the birth of emotion, at the birth of thought, of worship, of sexual fruition, competency, and desire, this remorseless inspiration of the ocean smote upon her breast and mind like some vast magic magnetism, holding her senses in its irresistible blissful power. And Nature was Lhatto’s schoolhouse; perhaps more deeply than ever since amongst men she dwelt in Nature, nursing at its breast, and yielding, as a child should yield, terror to its imprecations, obedience to its prayers.

But Lhatto, though thus imperiously influenced, had no introspections in the matter. She simply turned her beautiful face to the sea, and somehow a voice from that great deep said to her “Come!”

The sun had reached the ninth hour of the day when Lhatto turned backward to the shore, leaving the waves that were now lapping with soft kisses her knees and thrusting out innumerable tongues upon her smooth and sculptured thighs. She made her way unhesitatingly to a thicket of cedars which, by some propulsion, and encouraged by a spring of water welling upward near them, had advanced far beyond their companions, and by reason of this temerity had become the target of storms, which had broken their boughs, bent their growth, and thrust them upon each other as if, in a last fraternal embrace, they had concluded to die together.

In the shadow of this thicket, and now evident, as the Woman advanced toward it, lay a narrow keeled but somewhat well shaped and serviceable boat. It was a tree trunk hollowed out with some precision, the method being clearly indicated by the charred remnants of its roughened and chipped interior surfaces. The original tree trunk had been hewn down, its outer bark removed and one half of its circumference hacked away. Upon the section of the tree thus exposed fires had been lighted, or heated stones placed, and the incinerated wood loosened and excavated. The process had been toilsome; but in the primitive occupations of that prehistoric people, time or exertion counted for little, so free could they then be in the expenditure of each.

The boat had not been altogether carelessly conceived. A sort of prow, a square stem, full sides and a flat bottom made it useful along the shore fisheries, and a long paddle now lying at the bottom of the boat, and bruised and indented by use, showed that its occurrence was not accidental.

Lhatto threw her food basket and harpoon into the boat and then unwrapping the little bundle of clothes took out a pair of skin breeches, a soft fabric shirt, and a seal-skin blouse or jacket. She unloosened the fox skin apron about her loins. It dropped to the ground, and the nude Eurydice, save for the glittering anklets and wristlets and necklace, for an instant saw her beauty in the still encroaching waters that may even have hastened their tardier approach to indulge in the shadowy carresses of her reflection.

It was only for an instant, for even then modesty—the primal birthright and ornament of womanhood—in this wild child of nature, this woman hidden in the nameless, dateless past, made clear its claims. Lhatto, with a startled look, through which there also sprang hints of a mischievous and tantalizing happiness in her own beauty, half bent, half turned, though only the impersonal sky and rocks and trees were there, and snatched the waiting garments. Quickly they were drawn on over her warm bronzed skin, and then seizing the boat’s stern and pushing outward, she drove it across the shallow tidal flood, its harsh grating sounding strangely on that empty shore.

It floated, and as Lhatto stepped upon it, the sides were half hidden in the water. Her hand, with balanced rhythm, paddled the little boat out from the shore, and the crude invention evinced some artful adaptation for its purposes as it moved on an even and noiseless keel.

She first propelled it beneath the highest sheer cliff of dark basalt, whose pediments lay fathoms deep beneath the wave. The steep walls resounded in hollow and reinforced echoes, as she worked her way through gaunt spires of rock or looking upward caught the tiny rain that shot from some narrow shelf of rock tufted with grass, drenched with percolating waters.

For a moment she rested, and then her wandering eye turned seaward. Far out she saw the lifted ledges, remnants of the wasted dike, now withdrawn through the age-long conflict with frost and wave, leaving behind these rugged roots; and she saw too the glint of a seal’s gray body on the rocks. Quickly she turned the careening canoe and shot towards the distant spot where the white spray dashed upward. Perhaps a mile’s distance would cover the breadth of water she crossed, perhaps less. The ledges almost formed a low islet, and Lhatto still noticing the unchanged location of the seal whose eyes arrested by her approach now rested, half vagrantly turning from side to side, upon the unexpected visitor, steered her boat to the opposite end of the little patch of reef. It occupied her but a moment to slide the boat up upon a convenient and smoothed edge, and then as quickly to seize her harpoon, and hunter-like, creeping almost prostrate on the rocks, to reach a point almost directly above her still undisturbed prey.

Even as she raised in the air the sharp bone point of the harpoon above it, its eyes turned half languidly upon her, but no sense of alarm, scarcely an indolent effort to see her more clearly, interfered with her design. Lhatto paused, and the poise and action of her body, although hidden and disguised by her more cumbrous clothing, were strikingly suggestive, and full of interest. The succeeding second, and the harpoon, hurled with splendid precision, buried its murderous point in the neck of the seal that tumbling from its perch struggled momentarily in the water, pouring out a red stain upon the foam and green blades of waves. Its efforts were soon over, and hauled back and earned by Lhatto to the boat, its glazed eyes seemed to renew its vacant inquisition of this cruel and unexplained intruder.

Lhatto stood irresolute. Her minute scrutiny of the dead animal showed an awakening repulsion, and to the first glance of satisfaction succeeded an unsettled expression in which perchance regret fought with wonder, and finally surrendered to the latter. For the woman kneeled and pressed and smoothed the drenched skin, lifted up the disfigured head, and holding it in both hands so that its shadowed orbs were in the direct line of her vision, she sang again, and this time the song was low and whispering and plaintive.

THE SONG OF LHATTO.

The eye has gone out, and the breath,

And the thing is still, broken.

Where is the eye-look and the breath-spirit?

In the water, in the air, nowhere.

Hit it, it does not move.

Warm it, it does not move.

The wind cannot make it move.

Nor the water, nor the Sun.

Has it gone away? Will it come back?

And the primal woman leaned over the dead seal, and before the mystery of death began the long interrogation which man has ever put to this same wonder, running on past false prophets, ethnic faiths, revelation and modern science.

Lhatto disengaged the harpoon point which, as in the same instrument of the Esquimaux to-day, was attached by a thong to the wooden shaft that carried it, and washed it clean and replaced it in a socket in a handle. She laid it in the boat and stood lingering over the spot where the seal had been slain, perhaps with some propitiary thought, for the life she had taken from the world.

She turned to the boat that now with the receding tide had become half elevated from the water on the widening surfaces of the bared rocks. A light push, a leap and the rocking dug-out shot outward in a maze of ripples, with its agile occupant still standing upright, a curious gaze of interest rising in her face as she looked northward to the blanched and drifting ice bergs, intermittently visible and absent on the far horizon.

The girl slowly resumed her paddling, and began, after some hesitation, to row still further outward from the shore, that now seemed a long way off, its details softened into confused blotches of color, and its irregularities of outline merged into bold and simple shapes. The strangeness of her position, the weird isolation of her voyage on the Pacific, a human waif in the great void of expectancy of nature, certainly carried no intimation of its poetic or dramatic interest to her primitive experience, and feeling. She, the naive precursor of a continent’s population!

A fascination only drew her outward, the compelling curiosity of her nature, that delicate and insistent inquisitiveness of woman, which in more conventional forms is reduced and dissipated into the idle and transitory whims of modern life.

In Lhatto, this minimized attitude of interest in trifles, innuendos and intrigues, was foreshadowed by a great yearning; the stalwart, uninjured, bare response of her strong passionate heart to her own questioning of nature, to the myriad strains of sympathy between her and this chrysalis of mysteries into which she had been born. How shall we justly realize the proportions or properties of the first full formed human soul in a woman, standing somewhere near the marvellous incident which evolved or made her; yet possessing an indescribable heritage of half-animal instincts, transmuted let us hope, by the benison of the Great Intention, into a labyrinth of longings, and dreams, and hopes, and queries.

She moved constantly outward on the waste of waters, and her face was turned to the land looming up behind its first declivities in purple mountain tops, here and there accentuated in sharp and sparkling pinnacles. Still outward. And now so recklessly had she advanced that the thronging fingers of a great oceanic current, sweeping northward, like myriads of tiny tentacles, each the lapping summit of a drop of water, had seized her boat and slowly swerved it from its path, carrying it on the broad river of its eddying tides.

Lhatto seemed to notice nothing at first, but suddenly she rose to her feet. The receding land seemed miles away, the sun shone from the zenith, the little groups of rocks on which she had landed were lost to sight, a low creeping ripple made itself heard and the boat rose upon the successive swelling convexities of larger and larger waves. The realization of her position was acute. She worked vigorously to draw her little vessel out of the hastening and now vociferous tide, but for once her strong arm, nerved into desperation by a sense of impending danger, was impotent.

The struggle between the woman and the now exulting water, leaping and splashing upon her terror-stricken face, was an unequal combat. The insidious gliding wavelets, as if instinct with a hidden purpose, had disguised their force until their softly augmented power had reached the full measure of an irresistible purpose. Nothing now in that woman—become frail before the strength of natural agencies—could save her.

She stood up, and dropping the useless paddle, between her scooped hands shouted to the shore. The wild sad cry drifted lonely, shivering unanswered, over the hopeless plain of water, and if it reached the shore, died forgotten against the flinty barriers, or lost itself in cranny, crevice, and defile.

The tide grew stronger as if exultant in its remorseless purpose. The boat swayed and swung like a chip upon a descending stream, the dancing waters leaped about it, the long swells rose higher, and a growing cold caused the young creature to draw her wisely designed clothing closer to her form, while the unused paddle lay at her feet, and far beyond, as her appealing eyes looked northward, the great icebergs drew nearer.

Indeed the spectacle became each moment strangely beautiful and stupendous, and the despairing woman, in whom the dawning responses to beauty daily strengthened, forgot for a moment her extremity, in the superb picture that grew and grew as the now shooting currents carried her against its awful frigid majesty.

The day was far spent, the sun’s red disk hung on the very edge of the western horizon and the far away shores of the Fair Land, from which Lhatto had drifted, seemed drenched in purple, though above their peaks and domes of rock, a rosy light yet lingered. The sun, unattended by clouds but veiled in some unapparent mist, glowed garnet red, and its dissipated or obstructed rays dimly touched the ocean’s face with molten glints and splashes of bronzy gold.

North of the Fair Land, north of Lhatto lay the ice country, and it was thither her eyes turned with wonderment. She had heard of the ice country. Between it and her own Fair Land stretched the intermediate morainal zone, already described, where the hairy mastodon roamed in a dwindled but widely disseminated flora of low willows, birches, beeches, and gnarled ashes and spruce, where, in sheltered places, carpets of meadow sprinkled with color, spread between high beds of naked gravel, boulder piles, and clay. Her people had hunted there.

It was a strange climatic contiguity, the cold and ice-burdened north, the temperate or semi-tropic region of the Fair Land south, the neck of transition between.

It was not an impossible condition. In Dr. J. W. Gregory’s Great Rift Valley of Africa, a description is given of his ascending to the snow fields and glaciers of Mt. Kenya, and the reader is introduced to a succession of climates precisely such as prevailed in this reconstructed area of North America where the Romance of Lhatto and of Ogga was, as here described, evolved.

Mt. Kenya itself, garlanded with glaciers and snow beds, rises some 16,000 feet in the air almost beneath the equator.

The lowlands, miles away from its dark and arctic peaks, are tropical, where at 2 degrees South Latitude, the Athi River pours into the Indian Ocean. Nearer to the baffling peak, as the land rises, immense and dense forests spread an almost impassible skirt about it, the coniferous trees (podocarpus) and bamboo jungles indicate a cooler atmosphere, and through them hustle the chattering monkies (Colobus). Swamps, morainal hillocks succeed, the forests are replaced by herbs and bushes and scattering groves, with interspersed peat bogs, and then, beyond such a region of severer temperate conditions, rise the arctic highlands of the central confluence of ridges, chasms, and peaks, where a perpetual winter reigns. And all these progressive alternations are encountered in a radial circumference of fifty miles.

Already the hastening oceanic stream had carried Lhatto, as the night fell, nearly a hundred miles from the morning’s shore.

The night had indeed come; and Lhatto, who had long ago abandoned her desperate struggles to escape from the pitiless tide, crawled to the bottom of the boat, and crushing upon her head a cap of seal-skin, the last item of clothing left in her bundle, and eating ravenously of the meat and grain in her little basket, resigned herself to the strange possibilities now close upon her. And resigned herself without fear!

Fear indeed holds an awful sway in the primeval brain, stultified and dizzy before the unaccountable events in nature, its life and death, its storms and its silence, the stars, the depths of the earth, and all moving things. But an exalted phantasy sways there too. A sudden realization of fate and supernatural impulse, of swimming and winged and footed destinies carrying one on to prejudged conclusions, premade ends, prefixed disasters.

So Lhatto sat and dreamed and waited, and the biting air sank into her breast, and she fell asleep, almost undisturbed, acquiescent to all that might happen. And the same stars in the moonless night shone on her then, in the Ice Age, as they would shine on the same waters to-day, in the Age of Knowledge. And so Lhatto glided on unconscious, to the ice and the snow and the glaciers.

As the sun broke over the eastern rims of land, as its rays fell upon the half blinded eyes of the waking woman, a chill like a physical impact shook her frame. It was a strange and picturesque scene, one of unimaginable wonderfulness and beauty which met her eyes, and startled her into the widest wakefulness by the piercing cold. And it also was a scene of fantastic fearfulness and danger. The current had brought her to the lips, to the opening mouths and throats, the manifold necks and elongations, the waters fleeted with icebergs, the radiant cathedral spires, the minaretted roofs, the spouting super or englacial rivers, the dirt accumulations spilled from its lapsing morainal crusts; at the beryl wall of the Great Glacier, covering the North country, where it slid from the distant plateaux, even from the ice encased Mountain of Zit, rigid in frost, amid its dead and frozen hills, where it moved with breaks and bounds and dull detonations into the sea.

As the sun climbed the cloudless sky the immensity of this continental ice sheet was revealed to Lhatto. The very centre and composed inspiration of it all was the great towering mountain with its jutting and defiant peak of rock, where, as was shown before, the superb elevation was itself broken up into radiating chasms whose rocky sides rose in black keels of relief above the snow-filled gorges they defined, while surmounting them all, a keen shaft of granite, roseate in a hundred lights, or wrapped in pendulous and waving veils of mist, rose steeply to the clouds.

The extreme velocity of the current had abated and the dug-out floated slowly forward into this chaotic splendor of icy things. A vagary of the tide branching sideways brought the boat and its bewildered occupant into a sea of icebergs, ice-cakes, hummocks and toppling mounds of ice, where before her rose the very front of the high glacial stream pushing steadily into the water. In this amphitheatre of wonders, the crystal prison of the Ice King, full of structure and full of the most diffused and entrancing colors, here and there, in sockets and rifts, acute with passionate intensity, the boat rested, bobbing on the fluctuating waves.

Lhatto stood up on the dancing raft. Her limbs cramped with cold and the long stagnant sleep, seemed scarcely able to support her. But stamping and rubbing brought the life back to them, and the blazing sunlight brought back vitality to her body, even as it also started the ice streams, and to each tension of the ice masses supplied the loosening warmth that hastened their solution.

Before Lhatto was a terrace of ice, its minor irregularities masked by distance, with a height of many hundreds of feet, gashed, riven and melting, running for miles and miles interminably backward and sideward. At its feet, washed by the water, thousands of ice floats rose idly, or were rocked with waves produced by the falling into the sea of new additions to their number. Rivers were flowing in places over the ice front, discolored with mud, while leaning boulders of rocks at points were balanced on the edge of the glacier, or at other points protruding from the midst of its face, waited momentarily their own discharge into the ocean.

Beautiful and sublime ships of ice seemed stationary about her with their deep keels yet anchored to the sea bottom, sculptured and dissected, with snow drifts piled high upon them or arching in white cornices from the sides. An incessant murmur entered her ears, now and then punctuated by a sharper note of cracking and splitting, while the surges from the falling bodies, accompanied by most audible splashes, kept her boat tipping and turning, and rendered each movement she ventured to make, uncertain.

It was the panorama unrolled before her eyes landward beyond the blue and green precipices of the immediate glacier that drew her rapt attention. The rocky signal surmounting Zit soared above the ice fields, whose united surfaces, softened into an unbroken expanse, like huge shields, encircled it with gleaming armor; its lower attendant mountains secured a precarious freedom from the dominant oppression, some raising their heads in dark crests, above the snows, and the others banked over their highest reaches with fillets or reflecting bombs of snow. Below all these elevations the universal ice, written with a thousand details of serac, gorge, moraine, crevasse, and noonituck swept its dazzling and incredible domain.

Lhatto was beginning to feel a cruel hunger and she was very cold. The warm shirt, the seal skin dress, protected her, and over her feet she had also drawn a pair of sealskin boots, all so providently provided in her bundle of clothes, that it was almost certain that she had not been entirely without prevision of her coming necessity. But now it was hunger, too, that added its terrors to her isolation. She suddenly cast a satisfied glance upon the dead seal, already almost forgotten, lying in the boat. Beneath its plush-like covering lay the rich nutritous fat that feeds the fires of life beneath polar skies, with instantaneous and adequate fuel.

Her thoughts, now again wakeful and swarming upward with fresh hopes of escape, as the tide had stopped, and land far south showed its varying outlines, were suddenly interrupted. Although apparently arrested, her boat had been drawing imperceptibly closer to an enormous berg which lay, tilted sideways, from some dislocation of its centre of gravity, its bottom immovable in the mud. A beetling wedge of ice formed its apex. Beneath this impending block and straight against a shelf of ice at its base, the exile had drifted. The dug-out struck the ice-cake sharply and Lhatto was thrown forward upon the prow of the small boat. Her fall was fortunate. The next instant, long enough for the slight concussion to be communicated to the toppling summit, the great mass fell, splintering like some colossal Rupert’s bubble into myriads of fragments, indenting the water with a deep concavity upon whose depression the refluent waves rolled in deafening disorder. Lhatto lay just beyond—by the narrowest margin—the extreme verge of its showering cleavages. The stern of the boat was hit by a big cake and sank beneath the water. Lhatto leaped to her feet, sped forward upon the ice shelf of the berg and falling flat, grasped the retreating dug-out, which, sucked outward, almost pulled her after it. The strong muscles and the roughened edges of the berg holding her back by their asperities, catching in her loose and wrinkled dress, saved all.

Another moment the stress of peril was past, and Lhatto drew over the rim of the ice shelf the boat still containing the captured seal. A stranger and larger craft was now the vehicle of her further adventures.

Adventure was indeed certain, for relieved of its cumbrous and dislodged pinnacle, the huge iceberg reeled slowly over and with a pulsating boom that shook the gathered snows from its shoulders, in storms of irridescent dust, it rose from its muddy fastenings and floated; to follow perchance the spectral procession which in the morning of the previous day Lhatto had seen far south, proceeding outward on the trackless deep.

But apprehensions were for the instant forgotten. The woman drew from the pocket of her trousers a long thin blade, that shining from its concave facets revealed the substance of obsidian, or volcanic glass. She squeezed the plush-like skin of the seal, draining away the absorbed water, and then cut deeply into its back, and dexterously working the stone knife, dislodged the fat in lumps. And these she ate.

The reassuring comfort of satiety, the new warmth bringing with it courage, made Lhatto keen and anxious again. She reviewed the chances of her escape. The berg was moving. That she could detect by watching the sharp edges of its arête pass the features of the glacier beyond it, and that it was likely to follow in the wake of the endless train of emigrants whose majestic beauty was destined to vanish before the tropic suns, dropping like despoiled queens their ornaments of sparkling jewels in the hot waters of the south, was equally certain. What means did she possess to effect her escape? The boat was intact, food was there, the harpoon and paddle still remained, and her own good heart and buoyant muscles, the quick concurrence of ardor and of strength, were also hers.

The berg moved steadily out to sea. No time was to be lost; the sea was as yet undisturbed, save by its own unquiet breathing, and even this perturbation, near the shore, and shielded as her position was by fences of icy peninsulas and drifting ice, was now scarcely noticeable. If she left the berg and trusted herself upon the water, could she shun the tides which had brought her there? To answer this question it was essential for Lhatto to find out exactly where she was. The body and mass of the berg, in steps and colonnaded loveliness, was between her and the distance, only the shelf on which she stood offered any room for foothold or support.

She looked intently upward. Above her she could see a shoulder of ice projecting outward, and it seemed so disposed to the central trunk of ice as to suggest that it surrounded it with a sort of lower platform. If she could surmount this the wider circuit of vision would enable her to form her plans. The task was not easy. The wall of ice at her very face was steep and actually inclined outwards, and the nearest margin of its pendent edges was thirty feet away.

Lhatto studied the problem, but it was an impossible physical feat to ascend the glassy slope. The iceberg, with occasional shuddering thrills which broke the snow loose from its higher parts, sending down white showers upon the startled woman, was slowly veering seaward. The circling eddies around its edges betrayed its motion. It even seemed that the shelf on which she stood was being invaded by the sea water. Her boat, a few minutes ago dry on the ice, was now partially surrounded by water. Her dismay increased. Running almost hopelessly to and fro, a waif of humanity in the great arctic world, straining her eyes from the extremities of the tipping shelf where she stood, to see if possible what surmounted the platform above her, which she desired to reach, her eye noted a horn-like projection of cylindrical ice, suddenly revealed by one of the discharges of the powdery snow above.

It was a stalactitic formation of ice extending outward like the round limb of a tree. Lhatto’s eye detected here an opportunity. Wound around the long harpoon she had brought, were many feet of strongly woven cord, a provision made by her people in their hunting excursions, when their prey dove or swam from them. It was attached to the harpoon blade, and the device contemplated a separation of the blade from the stock or handle which floated to the surface, though still united by this long thong to the wounded animal, seeking escape below the water.

Lhatto quickly unwound this cord, severed it from the stock and blade and threw one end over the uprising and ringent projection. In another instant she had looped the other end about her thighs, pulled the noose tightly around her limbs, and then, seizing the disengaged end, drew herself upward as a trapeze performer does to-day in a circus ring.

When near the projection she caught it with one hand, let go of the rope and flung her other hand upon it and then drew herself quickly upward, flinging her legs upon the crust around her. She had gained an ample space extending outward from the spire of the iceberg on all sides. She could walk around the central mass and her eye traversed the whole visible area of the shores.

Instinctively she looked upward to Zit. Its granite obelisk still gleamed amid the ice, and a rare splendor of unbroken sunshine flooded the marvellous picture. A second time the Woman sank to her knees and from her untrained lips, from the speechless impulse of her heart, there rose a prayer for safety, and she stretched out her imploring hands to the distant mountain.

As she thus bowed to the sensible Deity before her, great wraiths and swirling towers of snow seemed developed upon one edge of the vast scene. They rose as colossal and advancing clouds, and closed with immense strides the whole picture of the mountain. Cold winds descended from their flanks, bearing a tornado of ice particles, whirring snow-flakes and poignant sleet. Poor Lhatto! She trembled in the gale and cold; the iceberg, pushed by the storm’s harsh hands, reeled outward, and the descending blizzard rapidly hid the outlines of the coast. The woman had caught the slightest glance eastward, but it was enough to show her that the glaciated areas faded away somewhere south into a barren region which seemed again succeeded by the Fair Country.

There was no time to lose. Other bergs loosened from their moorings, or started in more rapid motion, were crowding now upon the massif on which Lhatto stood, the water spaces about her were filled with cakes and hummocks, the waters themselves, violently disturbed, were forming into waves, the blinding snow crowded the air, and the dismal frightening moment seemed to seal her fate.

She turned anxiously and looked over the platform’s edge to see if her one little hope, the small dug-out, was yet upon the lower shelf. To her alarm, the greater part of this ledge had disappeared; a triangular section still held the canoe, but the leaping waves were falling upon it and it rocked upon the slippery floor, with every intimation of quickly following the broken portions of the berg. Lhatto, stricken with terror at the thought of her separation from the one link connecting her with home and the sweet memories of the southern land, looked hastily about her for some quick escape from the dilemma. She had inadvertently approached the curling edge of the upper platform and stood peering over it upon a bank of drifted snow. The plate of ice beneath her broke with a sharp rattle, and Lhatto, buried in the snow bank, was flung headlong upon the ice beneath. She emerged unhurt from the protecting blankets of wet snow and leaped to the dug-out. Another instant and she had coiled up the pendent strand from the ice bough by which she had ascended, thrown it and the harpoon into the boat, now slipping away with every new oscillation, and following both, launched herself amid the wilderness of ice, in the bitter breath from the frosty deserts of the glacier, in that desolate black moment when the light of day seemed extinguished, and the power of night held her prisoner in this sepulchre of death, with the shrill blasts whistling about her, a thousand missiles of hail pelting her remorselessly, and the inky waters, beaten into froth, curling their smitten crests about her.

Then the natal heroism emerged; her spirit met the unexpected and monstrous demand, her muscles stiffened into sinews of iron, and the prescience of her mind, educated by numberless adventures, directed her.

The very proximity of the stalking bergs, somewhat aligned in rows, protected Lhatto against the fiercer assaults of the wind, and permitted her to secure shelter from the rising waters. She adroitly directed her way between these stealthy and splendid argonauts, shooting across open lanes of water between them, skirting cautiously their quiet margins, even clinging to them, waiting for a propitious moment to move safely onward in her course.

The instinct of direction in wild men and women is acute and infallible. The obstreperous confusion of warring details in natural features becomes with them a completely composed picture with all the details properly distributed, and the relations of parts all accurately designed. Lhatto had seen but little from the iceberg, and distance had veiled it, but some compass of direction set instantly in her bright mind, and she knew, even in this labyrinth, the avenue of escape. It lay to the south-east.

The sudden tempest almost as suddenly abated, but all the startled movements it had inaugurated continued its physical effects long after its activity had ceased. The ice continued to pour outward from the glacier, the water remained froward and dangerous. Lhatto, still aiming to shield herself from the waves, had clung to the larger floats of ice in such wise as to secure immunity from their attack, but she could not much longer afford to drift with them too far to sea. She would have again met that tide perchance which first brought her northward, and besides she realized that, nearer in shore, a back setting tide might help her on her difficult return.

The moment had come for her to venture out upon the broken waves, and auspiciously as she shot her canoe from behind a barrier of ice to which she had tenaciously held, the sun again opened the canopy of the sky, and a light shaft flung athwart her boat seemed propitious to her animated fancy.

She had already passed over miles of water from the glacier’s edge and her encouraged heart grew hopeful. She left the friendly berg and directed her boat eastward against the waves. She worked the sea-worthy little dug-out with temerity and skill. She sat looking forward and her keen eyes, helped now by the renewed sunlight, watched the crested waves, their slanting or direct approach, and while she resisted their tendency to carry her from the shore, she so far permitted them to neutralize her advance, as was necessary to avert the danger of upsetting.

It was a clever and strong series of efforts, and to the sympathetic spirits watching her from some asylum in the skies her success must have elicited approving nods.

Slowly as the night fell the lapsing wind faded away; the sun’s parting rays piercing the higher atmosphere, left the cold world in darkness; spectral and terrifying shadows stole over the ice fields and one by one the stars in the firmament lit their everlasting vigils, and Lhatto, still struggling with the waves, moved silently shoreward, almost despairing with fatigue, but calling, in her brave primeval heart, upon all the powers of the blue black dome above her to bring her safely home.

All that night the tireless arms worked, and the nursed boat overcame the distance with increasing ease; the tide, mutable with new affections, now helped the exhausted maiden in place of opposing her, the wind, soothed into pity by the moving spectacle, brushed her onward with alternating puffs, and the surges on the far away shore made themselves heard so as to direct her path. Birds from the shore piped above her head, and ever and anon an earthy odor swept over her bowed head, to lure her hope with reviving thoughts of life and flowers.

But Lhatto slept. Her prostrate form lay backwards in the boat, the paddle had dropped from her nerveless hand, her seal skin cap had slipped from the clustering hair, dark with moisture, that pressed down upon her narrow and arched brow, the darting eyes were closed, and as the sun again toiled upward in the east, his light, touching many things with beauty, touched none more gently than the sleeping girl, saved from the sea anemone, or the thronging fish or the myriad coral beds, to be the mother of new men.

CHAPTER IV.
Ogga—The Man.

Where the opening valleys of the Fair Land turned northward into the Dismal Country of heaped ridges, interminable peat hogs, low woods, and scanty or puissant streams, upon an upland sparingly covered with trees, and almost on its incline to the lowland beyond it, dwelt Ogga—the mastodon hunter.

His house, if house it could be called, was a sort of tent of bark with skins placed upon an interior framework of sticks and so disposed that its doorway closed by a broad slab of bark, torn from the great Sequoia, looked over the Dismal Country to the northwest, and the strong eyes of its occupant could see the great glacier, and, if the air was clear, could always see the dark minaret of Zit above it.

The spot was redolent with charm—a charm that gained in interest as the eye turned to the ragged land north of it, where the dreary plain, showing occasional interruptions of hillock and stream, formed a refuge for its disappearing tenantry of mastodon and bear. By some accident of vegetable distribution, or through some violence of weather, a smooth clear space surrounded Ogga’s bark home.

Behind this advancing table land, a dark block of lofty trees rose with majestic forcefulness. They were the giant trees. Their tapering summits with arrow-like precision melted into the blue sky like a winged flight of birds, and far beneath, the broad trunks stood in dark colonnades, a kind of architectural vestibule to the mantling woods, hiding, with their deep umbrageous solidity, the retreating and rising and falling mountains.

When Ogga opened the door of his tent he could look over the steep land ascending to the glacier, and not infrequently he watched the mastodon moving in small herds, or a few individuals in pairs stirring in dark patches among the low trees and bushes at the sides of rivers; could even see their white tusks reflecting the light from the curved ivory, could even hear their low trumpet calls increasing to brisk short snorts, or the wash of the pond waters as their slouching bodies entered some unfrequented pool to drink or bathe.

The sides of his tepee were partially covered with mastodon hide, and fragments of tusk and a few large molars of the prehistoric beast lay on the ground near his door way.

The mastodon was itself a proboscidian which had become widely distributed through the northern half of the American Continent at the close of the Great Glacial Day. It advanced southward and retreated northward, if such expressions have a permissible use, with the advance and retreat of the glacier, the great ice cap, which had in an irregular manner, modified by position, topography and local conditions, stretched from the highlands of Canada north and south. Thus distended it had enveloped the present eastern, middle and western states, withdrawing farther north as its edge extended to the West, but in the West connected with outlying positions along the higher altitudes of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas, and pressing to the borders of the ocean at every possible opportunity.

The warm winds from the Pacific, a rise on the west coast, then as now of the isothermal lines, contracted its western expansion. The flora and silva of this section, thrust backward from the north by the invasion of the ice, somewhat more encouraged here in their resiliency against the cold, with intermittent daring stoutly defended more advanced northern stations than did the floras and silva of the East. In the East the long lip of the glacier hung, on the southern boundaries of Pennsylvania, and its refrigerating influence was felt many degrees further south.

Along the fringes of local glaciers as that of the Mountain of Zit in the abundant vegetation—the grasses, the bushes, the aspiring woodland—which were fed by streams, percolating through the sands or issuing in the clay basins and losing some of the extreme cold, in these favorite spots the mastodon congregated. They moved through the country in small herds, frequently in pairs. A certain caution had become hereditary, for prowling sabre-toothed cats (Smilodon) were lured from warmer regions to prey upon these boreal elephants. The method of attack which the nature of the ground made most effective was for the cat to crouch upon some table land or shelf overlooking a defile leading to a pool or stream, or a meadow, and blurring itself with the brown yellowish soil, await the approach of its cumbrous antagonist. It invariably chose the last member of the procession, or better, a belated straggler. Leaping from its high perch, executing springs of surprising velocity and width, it landed on the back of its terrified victim. A struggle ensued, which not infrequently resulted in the discomfiture of the sanguinary bandit, for unless too much engaged or too quickly disabled, the surprised mastodon trumpeted its distress, and this often led to a return of the bulls of the herd, in which case, as the odds became more formidable, the vicious tiger retreated, but never without inflicting dangerous wounds.

Its flight did not mean, however, permanent retreat. It dogged the footsteps of the listless mastodons expecting that the wounded member of the herd would drop behind and become an easy captive, or die from some vital lesion. In either case the ferocious smilodon easily completed its design.

Ogga had indeed witnessed a strange reversal of parts in these combats. The mastodons, if there were more than one bull in the herds, seemed to become infuriated at times, and, encouraged by numbers, turn savagely upon the snarling pleistocene lion and chase it for long distances. The tiger, with tail withdrawn and seized with panic, would rush headlong away, the bristling mastodon pursuing; the heavy trampling, the impetus of their great bodies against interfering trees or shrubs, and their encouraging calls making a weird tumult in those silent deserts. But such a chase was quite usually or always unavailing. The cat, springing sideways, would vanish from view up a tree, the slope of a bank, or even in the long grass, and the disappointed or confused mastodons, losing sight of their enemy, would suddenly collide in an animated throng, and, still exasperated, turn with sudden vehemence upon each other.

The smilodon, the terrific tiger of those young years, voracious and blood-thirsty, was not a natural occupant of this northern zone. It was a rare animal, though almost constantly present in the warmer seasons, in small numbers or perhaps in single pairs. It belonged to the regions of South America, but at that time the Isthmus of Panama had a much greater lateral extension, and the avenues of animal migration north or south became greatly widened. A coastal platform, torrid and moist, and the central ridges, flanks, and successional elevations of the Rocky Mountains offered a contrasted range of conditions for the movement to and fro of wild animals.

Predatory animals, like the smilodon, made their way northward with precarious and tentative advances. And the mastodon so far established itself in South America, as to become under the modifying influences of separation and environment the elephant of the Andes in Peru.

As Dr. Von Schenck has recorded, the Bengal tiger ranges northward to the latitude of 52 degrees or even 48 degrees in Asia, to which point the Polar Bear in a reversed manner descends from the north.

It is easy to conceive that contemporaneous possession of a common ground by a hunter and carnivorous beast like the Sabre-toothed Tiger, and the vegetable feeding elephants, would have acted as an inducement, of varying intensity but always present, for the former to extend its range and enter the grazing grounds, the formal metropolis of the latter.

Ogga was an ivory hunter and he had also encountered a few displaced walrus coming down from the Behring Sea region. The occasional pursuit of these visitors carried him to the shores of the ocean, and so in his zestful and industrious quest for this precious material he had become acquainted with the trails, passes, rivers, lakes and inhabitants of this whole land. It was his domain. The fierce inclemency of its winters, the terrors of its storms, the temperate luxuriance of its summers, were all known to him, and in its long and vigorous exploration by him he had passed almost into the arid canyon country on the east. Amid so much varied activity, from this dependence upon skill and strength and courage, the character of Ogga had grown upward into a structure of available and solid qualities of heart and mind, and to him, as to all these precursory denizens, an intimacy with nature, a perpetual companionship with the air and the ground, and the beasts, had woven a thread of sentiment not unreal, not unusual, in the strong fibres of his being.

It was the morning of the same day on which Lhatto hastened from the highland to the shore, driven by an instinct or some suasion, knit in with the destiny of races, that Ogga stood watching the chasing snow wreaths upon the distant Zit, equipped for a new hunt for ivory amongst the hidden mastodon in the low country before him. He was a picture of aboriginal beauty.

His stature was accentuated by the spareness of his frame, its muscular precision, and the coppery swarthiness of its hue. He wore a skin apron and at the moment when he emerged from his tent nothing else hid the sinewy and blended outlines of the figure, incorporated with suggestions of endurance, pliability and action.

His face was youthful, in an Indian type, the cheek-bones high but not relieved, the eyes set and scrutinizing, with that ineffable gaze of mystery fitting his relations to an unborn world. His hair, black and braided, hung about his head, and he had drawn into his wide mouth with its thin lips a string upon which his teeth were fixed, gleaming above a short chin carried backward into the mandibular processes of his jaw by strong quadrangular lines. His beauty would have startled, by its brusque combination of grace and poise and woodland variety, a drawing room of exquisites but it would have also soon become repellent under such artificial conditions, and would only have courted the admiration of curiosity. Where he was, in the morning light, at the side of the rough wigwam upon an upland on whose carpet of grass the sunlight lay in patches, with the sombre and wonderful majesty of primeval forests, themselves the type of an extinct time, behind him, and with that lonely landscape of steppe and lake and river before him, its farthest edges rising to the unmantled glory of the glacier, Ogga was superb and invincible, and prophetic. He waved his hand significantly to the distance and even as Lhatto had bowed and prayed to Zit, Ogga now bent forward and with arms folded across his breast, littered some incoherency of worship to the titular and tutelary genius of his world.

For a few moments Ogga disappeared and when again he stood at the doorway he was accoutred for the hunt which was to be the day’s occupation.

A long knife made of green nephritic stone hung by a twisted cord about his neck, close fitting skin trousers of fox’s or wolf’s skin, the fur cut or burnt off to the surface of the hide, covered his legs, a belt of mastodon skin girded his waist, held in place by two pins of bone. A sort of shawl or mantel tied at the cincture of his neck was thrown backward behind his shoulders. This latter element of his attire was the entire skin of a reindeer, curtailed of its tail and legs, and forming a sort of peak or hood above his head. A basket, holding the pemmican-like masses which Lhatto had taken with her to the shore, some flint-stones, or “fire makers,” and scraps of dried and powdered wood, were fastened to his belt, and in one hand he swung a formidable spear.

This latter weapon, the insignia and instrument of his trade and prowess, was an illustrious example of wild art. It was almost seven feet long—the shaft made of a dense arbor-vitae wood much rubbed and rudely ornamented with incised lines, herring bone patterns, and circles; the shaft bore at its bifurcated or socketed extremity a superb flat blade of walrus ivory, the tusk or canine of one of these phocidean creatures, but despoiled of its cylindricity, and made into an evenly tapering javelin of fatal power. Two rings of dark green stone, cemented with pitch, held it firmly to the handle, and inscribed upon it was a doubtful outline of a mastodon. One other implement completed his equipment. It was a stone hammer of fair proportions, withed tightly to a wooden handle which clasped it around its hollowed sides, and came together beyond it. This was stuck, handle down, into his belt.

The hunter stood still, and shading his eyes, as if irresolute, looked towards a remote oval of water which, suddenly illuminated by the sun, threw its rays upward with the intensity of a spectrum. His inspection of the distant spot was satisfactory. He grunted and turned down the path. It led after a few premonitory winds straight down the embankment, and after half a mile entered the seclusion of a small cedar wood. The trees were not, however, in such proximity as to preclude the sunlight. There were more or less open spaces, and here in charming profusion grew clumps of wild anemone. Inside the wood, the murmur of running water at a distance became quickly audible, its faint vibrations failing to penetrate entirely the acoustic hedge of trees.

The man hurried along with great strides and soon emerged from the wood, which a backward glance would have discovered occupied a thin slip of arable soil at the edges of the stormy, boulder-covered plain, through which our Nimrod was forcing his way with impatient haste. The scene, except for the bright sky and the copious sunlight, would have been disquieting and dreary. It was a sort of domed eskar or gravel heap formed by glacial agencies which had vanished. Crossing its low crest where the trains of boulders, fragments of rock, angular and scored erratics imparted an unmistakable glacial expression to the whole accumulation, Ogga found himself looking into a long depression holding now a swiftly flowing river. The stream was quite unequal in this respect. Broad pools expanded its course in places and here its current became sluggish or imperceptible. Releasing itself from these, temporary relaxations, it poured over low dams of clay and sand, and spilled in foam and cataracts to lower levels, on its certain way to the coast.

One of these lakes was near at hand. It was the water Ogga had seen from his tent reflecting the sun’s rays. Toward it, still following the summit of the prolonged ridge, Ogga turned his steps. The violence or power or duration of the former ice transportation was seen by the monoliths amongst which he moved. Great cubes of stone thrown against each other and surmounted by others, formed veritable observatories, while approximate alignments of huge masses brought so closely together that their opposed sides formed alleys and corridors, in which the sun never penetrated; impregnable shelters for fugitive reserves of ice, or snow still remaining from the winter’s storms.

At times Ogga quite disappeared in these hidden streets, his reappearance occurring after such an interval of time as had permitted him to make considerable progress towards the lake. Finally, climbing a long slope, over one aspect of which the escaping waters from above emptied themselves in a noisy torrent, Ogga stood on the edge of a very considerable basin. It was formed in a continuation, on a higher level, of the eskar over which he had been moving. Receding around it were terraces of gravel and sand and clay. The lake lay in this enclosed pocket, a deep hole formed perchance by some torrential power of water, or occupied at a former time by an enormous mass of ice, a fraction of a great glacier which had become imbedded in the mud and stony debris, and finally, succumbing to the increasing heat, had melted, discharging its mineral burdens about it, heaping up the walls of its own prison, until it itself vanished, its witness and transmuted form being the lake that succeeded it. The terrace, or higher ground embracing it, formed at points vertical escarpment, especially at its upper end, where the river that fed it had worn down its bed through the centre of such an embankment of wasted and foreign matter.

The lake was not unattractive. It was a sort of Arctic mere. Vegetation in low growths of willows or alders and ashes, emphasized in the most surprising way by an aberrant pine or even cypress, sticking up its tall spire, covered some of its sides. In patches of grass, the Arctic scene displayed a vigor and brilliancy that brought even from the apathetic Ogga exclamations of interest or delight.

The hunter, emerging on this deep tarn, paused. His eyes rose above the borders of the lake, crossed the empty plateau beyond it, and met again far off Zit, with its iron crown, amid the discomfited and baffled glaciers whose tardy defeat was already recorded in this vacant ground. He seemed absorbed in contemplation when a brushing sound, the sway of crushing branches, and a half suffocated sigh proceeding from a bunch of birches at the head of the lake almost immediately bordering the debouchement of the vociferous river, turned all his languor into strained expectation.

The next instant and the curving tusks of an immense mastodon sprang into view from between the parting branches, and the uplifted trunk of the proboscidean, lifted up between them, hurled outward in this arena of devastation and utter solitude the same trumpeting note which from its congeners in the tropics of India or Africa awoke the echoes of the jungle and the bush. Ogga fell flat upon his chest, watching every movement of his great quarry. The mastodon stopped at the water’s edge and then with a renewed roar plunged into the lake. He was alone. Ogga knew well the call. It was the cry of the desolation of loneliness. The great beast had in some way lost his companions; diverted from their spoor or possibly attacked, it had wandered from the herd, and with almost human desperation was struggling to regain them. The cry was not the note of anger, its shrill vibrant hoarseness marked the exacerbation of a sense of desertion and hopelessness.

The place where the huge creature had entered the water was not deep but thickly encumbered with silt and sediment brought by the stream, loaded with the dust of the attrition of the ancient rocks. Into this unconsolidated mud the unfortunate and disturbed animal sank deeply. Its fore quarters sank first and as its body entered the pond its entire bulk seemed suddenly swallowed up. Its head disappeared beneath the water. The tips of the tusks and the exsert trunk, through which it breathed, were yet above the surface. It was visibly fighting fiercely against engulfment, and the agitated water broke in small waves at the side of Ogga.

The herculean strength of the mastodon won, and essaying still deeper water, liberated from its treacherous footing, it reappeared, its head half emergent, swimming to the opposite shore. Ogga arose on his knees, his spear drawn tightly across his abdomen by both hands, and a smile lurking in his face still wove its intangible tracery of pleasure about his eyes.

And now the dramatic movement increased in interest. As Ogga looked the smile vanished from his eyes, a sudden keen excitement took its place, he leaped to his feet, his mouth opened as if he were about to speak, but no word or syllable or sound was heard. Moving stealthily, crouching, belly flat, upon the ground, to which in color it offered a deceptive resemblance, Ogga saw on the opposite bank towards which the disconcerted mastodon was now strenuously swimming, the hateful form of the tiger-cat, the smilodon, the sabre-toothed, the vagrant savage from the south.

Indeed the spectacle roused all the deeply seated, and through practice, exercised instincts of the hunter. He watched, and the color slowly ebbing from his cheeks again ebbed back, his hands clasping the useless spear rose and fell, the surges of his emotion broke in suspirations from his lips, the soul of the hunter realized the meaning of that animal encounter beneath the glacial skies.

The mastodon now clambered with frequent scrambles and awkward plunges up the opposite bank. Its footing, uncertain on the rolling stones and pebbles, dislodged from the terrace, hardly permitted it to make much progress. Still immersed in the water, its broad back glistening with drops of water enmeshed in its hairy hide, it stood still, rolling its long trunk between its tusks and emitting harsh cries of distress and recall.

The brown heap upon the scantily clothed upland, on the very verge of the incline up which the mastodon was endeavoring to rise, moved cautiously forward, and Ogga could see rising and falling in the long grass the sweeping tail of the cat; he could see the half opened jaws of the beast of prey exposing the murderous canine that descended from its upper jaw, curving backward, like a white stiletto; he could even discern that masked movement of the muscles which the cat so wonderfully controls and by which it slips along the ground with almost imperceptible creeping of its hidden feet. Ogga saw the whitish fur of its underside pressed out in thick folds as the animal hugged the earth with furtive malice.

And yet the mastodon was unconscious. Perhaps if he had seen the ambush, it would not have diverted him from his purpose. Again he forced his huge mass out of water up the bank. The water now rose above his hind quarters, but his shoulders were fully exposed. Again he trumpeted, turning his head slowly around. In another instant his eyes would have detected the smilodon. The latter had now abandoned concealment, it rose to its full height, then sank back upon its haunches, its whole body disappeared. The succeeding moment, as Ogga leaped to his feet, the body of the cat was launched into the air. Ogga saw its outspread legs, the extended claws, the tail stiffened outward in a line with its back; his ears caught the half stifled snarl of the descending carnivore as it rose from the bank, and immediately they heard also the thud of its impact upon the gray and brown prominences of the mastodon’s body. The crafty creature had not altogether succeeded. The great impetus given to it in its wide leap outward, and a necessary descent in a vertical line of over some twenty feet imparted an unexpected revolution to its body. It fell upon the mastodon but was propelled over it, and a confused jumble of tail, legs, head and claws met Ogga’s view, as, in the excitement of his interest, he ran forward. The terrific elastic strength of the animal saved it from falling in the water. It recovered itself, inflicting long lacerations in the hide of its host. Almost instantly as it regained its own equilibrium it dashed forward to the head of its victim.

The mastodon at first seemed shocked into immobility, the next moment its head shook violently, its trunk with leviathan energy was swung around and backwards, its evident design being to dislodge the invader. To avoid this revolving sledge the cat had sprung forward and crouching upon the frontal bones of the elephant had, with claw and tooth, attacked its eyes. The excruciating agony drove the mastodon into a demoniacal rage; the cat had torn away one cheek and the excavated orbit of the elephant’s eye was drenched in blood. The mastodon, furious and demented, turned backward into the lake, and as he turned some rolling stone beneath his feet, some inequality or sudden compression of the muddy floor threw him sideways. With an asthmatic roar, his trunk still lifted above the surface, he sank, and the imperilled cat, half immersed, clung to his head, so deeply submerged as to deprive her of all opportunity of assault.

The cat’s position was indeed unique. The elephant had now completely abandoned its first attempt to reach the other side of the lake. It turned and swam into the central current, that eddied in broad swirling vortices directly in the path of the inrushing river. The cat perched upon its living raft was plainly disconcerted. Its own irritable snarls mingled with the occasional whines of the mastodon; it stirred restlessly in its unwelcome bath, its glaring eyes and hideously distended mouth, turning upon Ogga, whose presence, no longer concealed, seemed to add a new motive or accent of ferocity to its dismay.

The exit of the water from the lake was made over a glacial dam, forming the slope Ogga had ascended. Through this wall the corrosive action of the stream had partially excavated a shallow channel. The descent was still abrupt, and the overflow of the lake, which now was excessive by reasons of the accelerated contributions from the melting ice-barriers and fluviatile discharges from the glaciers, poured down over it in a deep flood.

Towards this perilous avenue of escape the mastodon was moving, and the smilodon, tamed now by the cold and its untoward position, had abated its defiant growls. With eyes almost piteously fixed upon the shores, its cries had fainted into disconsolate moans. Erecting itself upon its unstable support, the head of the mastodon, which sensibly had risen so that the mammoth could itself discover its position, the cat seemed about to project itself upon the water and seek summary escape from its embarrassments.

Both had now more than half passed the centre of the small but deep lake, and the current which had relaxed its velocity as their distance increased to the head of the lake, began to resume its initial force as it felt the suction of the waterfall at the foot of the expanse. At this moment, a critical one for the smilodon, the elephant suddenly sank completely, his trunk and the polished tips of his tusks disappearing simultaneously. The cat, completely inundated, was swept from its high perch, and sprawling in the water, was forced to swim to safety. At this instant Ogga became a participant in the feral drama.

Running along the rim of the pond, he placed himself where the cat, slowly extricating itself from the middle tide, was with difficulty directing its way. He untied the reindeer skin from his neck, dropped the spear, and hastily surveying the ground, chose a few plummet-shaped stones from the numbers of stones encumbering the bank. Armed with these he retired a short way back from the very edge of the lake, to a low elevation. This slight prominence afforded him a clearer view and brought the range of his efforts more directly upon the upper surfaces of the bewildered animal. His object was evident.

The cat was now swimming directly toward him. Ogga raised his arm. With lightning speed, with the swiftness of a hurled bolt, the smooth missile left his hand and smashed against the skull of the smilodon. It was followed by a rain of others. They crashed upon the creature, they entered its eyes, they tore its skin, they broke its teeth, they opened its back. The water foamed with their rapid impact. The desolated beast, now reduced to suppliance, still pursued its course to the shore. During the short intervals when Ogga searched about him for those water-worn and ellipsoidal pebbles which furnished him with the most effective weapons, the creature, still strong and formidable, gained in its approach. At last its feet touched the bottom, and as if renewed in all its tenacious instincts, dripping and shrunk, its beautiful coat pressed upon its lank and muscular form, it sprang forward, its horrid mouth suffused and vomiting blood.

Ogga sprang to meet it. But he held no rounded stones. Above his head was poised a heavy boulder. As he advanced the smilodon with cowering and subtle evasion crouched; its head lay flat upon the earth, its long tail swept the ground behind it with eager oscillations. Ogga rushed on. The dazed animal did not move, the great rock fell upon its crumbling, cracking skull. The smilodon was dead.

The mastodon had reaped the reward of its nimble strategy. Relieved of its incubus it had turned again to the opposite banks, and when Ogga had despatched its foe, it stood on the plain, suffering from its wounds and wailing in whistling squeaks which sounded incongruously enough when compared with its enormous size. Its bulk was indeed unusual, and Ogga looked at the superb tusks garnishing the huge head, with envy. It was just then browsing, tearing up small herbs, seizing bushes and uprooting them, and with its trunk beating them upon its own body at the spots where its dead enemy had inflicted painful gashes.

Ogga recovered his composure. He dragged the smiloden up from the water’s edge, replaced his shawl, picked up his spear, and hurried on up the stream. About a mile beyond the lake, the river which fed it broadened out in a flat, saucer-like depression full of stones and boulders, over which it rippled and broke with musical cadences. Here Ogga readily crossed the stream, and once over hastened back, hoping to find the mastodon, which it was now his evident intention to secure. The prey was more vulnerable because of its lost eyesight, though its isolation, as Ogga well knew, would add vigor to its self-defence, and its recent experience render it less susceptible to stratagem.

When Ogga had returned on the other side to the herbage and bushes where he had left the mastodon, the animal had gone. It was not difficult to trace its steps, and indeed its frequent trumpetings heard at a distance revealed inerrantly its location. The trail led up; a continuous ascent carried the hunter from the lower valley to a wide and mountainous plain, extending indefinitely on all sides, and only interrupted in its even surfaces by islands of unassorted glacial tilt. These formed elliptical elevations. They were the unremoved relics of a great deposit of the same material, covering this whole area, which had resisted the pluvial agencies which had degraded and disturbed the morainal accumulations. Their elongated shape—one axis longer than the other, and the longer axes in all cases directed in the same direction—showed their origin. Floods of water had at some time poured over this terrace, gradually the streams on the surface had excavated for themselves deeper channels, and then wearing away their banks, had finally crossed the partitions separating them from neighboring streams, and the confluent and united inundation had denuded and degraded the whole plain. These residual hillocks were now the only witnesses of the former surface and composition of the land.

When Ogga reached the level of this plain, as he glanced across it, no trace of the mastodon was discovered. The almost naked field before him was empty. But there had been no mistaking the heavy impress of the prodigious feet of the mastodon, and without halting, Ogga followed the great foot marks out into the plain. They led him directly to one of these isolated projecting spools of gravel, and they disappeared behind it.

This projection was some thirteen or fifteen feet high, its upper surface was coated with a feeble growth of grass, and its sides incurved so that the upper rim of the mound ran outward and overhung. A few observations only were necessary to reveal to Ogga the exhausted quadruped sitting behind the mound preternaturally still, its hind legs thrown sideways, its fore legs stiffly extended, and its great head, covered with the deep furrows made by the tiger’s claws and shockingly disfigured, where its right eye had been gouged from its socket, thrown backward.

Ogga spoke: “He is mine;” but he watched him for many moments longer, forming his plans, and preparing for the skillful work which would save his words from becoming an idle boast. Again the man threw away his cloak and basket, flung from him the heavy stone maul, retaining only his spear and knife.

He clambered carefully to the top of the mound, examined its circumference, and when apparently satisfied with his observation, placed the ivory spear at one point near the edge, and on the side above the still motionless mastodon. Then Ogga slid and tumbled down, drew his nephrite knife from his neck and crept around to the mastodon. The brute had remained in the same position, but its pain forced from it deep sighs, and it trembled. Ogga’s demeanor was inspired with daring and though his movements were governed by extreme caution, there was not implied for an instant hesitancy or fear.